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2024-03-14

The Hebrew Bible – Composed only 300 years before Christ?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Below is a revised version of a post I submitted to the earlywritings forum. It is the first in a series setting out the foundational arguments for the Old Testament books being written as late as only 300 years before Christ, no earlier. The case being proposed is that our earliest books of the Bible did not have a heritage traced back to Bronze Age times, not even as far back as the kingdoms of Israel and Judah — nor even the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Judeans who were transported to Mesopotamia by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century BCE. Rather, the proposition advanced here is that they were the creations of a time after Alexander the Great swept across “Asia” and just prior to the Hasmonean and Maccabean eras. The argument to be advanced is that the earliest books of the Bible originated in the Greek era, only a couple or so centuries before the Roman conquest and time of Jesus.

When we apply the fundamentals of historical methods as practised by historians in fields other than biblical studies we quickly see logical flaws at the heart of the conventional understanding that the sources for various biblical books (in particular the stories in Genesis and Exodus) go back as far as the times of David and Solomon.

Multiple sources and circularity

Several times I have engaged in the EarlyWritings Forum on the question of the how the Hebrew Bible came about over long centuries of accumulated writings and editings [i.e. the Documentary Hypothesis] and every time, it seems to me, the argument submitted to prove that the stories came about over long spans of time is the same: the evidence clearly shows us that different stories were combined into one. The classic illustration of this is the Flood story of Genesis. There can be little doubt that two different flood narratives are combined here. Sometimes the account says Noah brought in the animals two by two but in another place it tells us that there were seven of each kind! There are many more indicators to verify the point.

My response has been each time that I have no doubt that different sources were mixed to create the Genesis Flood account, but it does not necessarily follow that those different stories arose and came together over a long time period.

Think of it for a moment: An editor sees before him a story which says that the animals went into the ark two by two. That editor has in mind another story that he has acquired, one that says there were seven of each kind of animal. Now what is that editor likely to do if he wants to create a new single narrative? Would he be likely to keep the two by two account alongside the new one with the sevens? Or should we rather expect that he would delete the two by two references and replace them with what he prefers as the more valid story about the sevens?

What we have is a case of the editor deciding to combine details, even though contradictory, into one new narrative.

To me, that sounds like the editor had two different stories before him and he saw his role as being required to blend the two together, preserving the details of each, to create a single new authoritative story.

If that was the case, there is no reason at all to suppose that the Flood story as we have it is evidence of composition involving the accumulation of different sources over a long time span. It is no less reasonable to think that two interest groups created their own account and an editor was tasked with the job of making them one so that there was one narrative that all could respect as reflecting their own views. Such a project is conceivable as taking place from start to finish within months or even weeks, not necessarily centuries or even decades!

So how did the conventional notion of a centuries long evolution of the Bible come about? Biblical scholars, it is no secret to anyone, not even to themselves on the whole, do have interests that go beyond pure historical research. Even Julius Wellhausen, to whom we tend to attribute the modern notion of the “Documentary Hypothesis”, has been criticized for allowing his Protestant (anti-legalistic) bias to subconsciously influence his model of the “Documentary Hypothesis”. (The criticism has been directed at the widespread idea that “legalistic” texts were a late addition to the original “spiritual” and “prophetic” narratives found in the biblical canon.)

When hypotheses become facts

So much in biblical studies that passes for facts are actually hypotheses, or “theories” of a certain kind. But they are repeated so often it is hard to notice that they have no basis in the hard evidence. Look at this passage from Wellhausen:

With regard to the Jehovistic document [i.e. one proposed “early source” in the Bible], all are happily agreed that, substantially at all events, in language, horizon, and other features, it dates from the golden age of Hebrew literature, to which the finest parts of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and the oldest extant prophetical writings also belong, the period of the kings and prophets which preceded the dissolution of the two Israelite kingdoms by the Assyrians. About the origin of Deuteronomy there is still less dispute; in all circles where appreciation of scientific results can be looked for at all, it is recognised that it was composed in the same age as that in which it was discovered, and that it was made the rule of Josiah’s reformation, which took place about a generation before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans.

That’s from

Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (originally published 1882)

His assertion of relative dating is grounded entirely in scholarly consensus, not in the evidence itself. No doubt those scholars who make up the “consensus” believed they had serious evidence for dating the book of Deuteronomy to the days of King Josiah — but we will see that really they did not. They relied entirely upon “what the Bible says”.

There does happen to be archaeological evidence indicating that prior to the Hellenistic era Judeans and Samaritans had no knowledge of the biblical laws. I am referring to the finds in a Judean colony in Egypt, the Elephantine papyri. (I have not posted nearly enough about this find and what various scholars have had to say about it, but hope to make up for that lack very soon.) The Documentary Hypothesis, it has been pointed out by at least one scholar in the biblical field, might well never have got off the ground had the Elephantine remains — indicating that Persian era Jews knew nothing of the Pentateuch — been discovered earlier and had more time to gain traction and wider and more focused attention than it had before the time of Wellhausen’s work.

None of this is to say that biblical scholars are unprofessionally “biased” or “unscholarly”. Of course they are scholarly and their biases are generally known and admitted and taken into account. But their work tends to be picked up by others and over time taken for granted as fact.

Independent evidence is critical

The fact remains that there is no independent evidence that the OT was composed prior to the Hellenistic era. That datum alone does not prove it was a Hellenistic product. But it does at least allow for the theoretical possibility that it was created in the Hellenistic era, and given that our earliest independent evidence for a knowledge of the Pentateuch is situated in the Hellenistic era, it is entirely reasonable to begin with that era when searching for the Pentateuch’s origins.

It also is a fact that scholarship has only cursorily (by comparison) begun noting echoes of Hellenistic literature and thought within the Pentateuch itself. Those are facts. Another fact is that Documentary Hypothesis is not without its inconsistencies and problems – another point I can post about in more depth.

Those facts do not prove that the Pentateuch was created in the Hellenistic era. But they do at least make it possible to ask the question. It makes it all the more necessary for anyone proposing an earlier date to ground their reasons in supporting independent evidence of some kind.

The meaning of “Hellenistic”

The Hellenistic provenance of the Pentateuch does not deny any use of pre-Hellenistic literature or sayings or concepts. Hellenization even means a uniting of Greek and Asian cultures, not a replacement of one by the other. So one should expect in any Hellenistic era hypothesis for the Pentateuch clear allusions to non-Greek (i.e. local Canaanite and Syrian) sources. Yes, we can identify where passages in the Pentateuch are borrowed from ancient Ugaritic (Canaanite) or Syrian sources, but employing local literature does not contradict the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the Old Testament.

The fateful year of 1992

My own understanding of the history of the scholarship in this area informs me that the floodgates to a more widespread acceptability in questioning the “deep antiquity” (pre-Persian era) origin of any of the OT books were opened by Philip R. Davies in 1992 with his publication of In Search of Ancient Israel. The irony was that Davies was only collating various criticisms and doubts about the conventional wisdom of “biblical Israel” that had been available to scholars for some decades. But by bringing these questions and doubts all together in one short publication (only about 150 pages of discussion) Davies’ work started something of an academic “kerfuffle”. [The above sentences are a paraphrase from memory of a review of Davies’ book but, apologies, I cannot recall their source.] Davies himself argued at length for a Persian era provenance of many of the OT books, but those who followed the evidence he set out could see that the way was also open for an even later period. Some scholars identified stronger links between the Pentateuch and Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings) and Hellenistic literature than to anything earlier. One French scholar has even argued that the entire Primary History was composed by a priest in the Hasmonean era.

Davies certainly established the circularity of the arguments that much of the OT literature was composed in the times of King Josiah and the Babylonian captivity. He also brought together the archaeological evidence that indicates the very notion of “biblical Israel” (along with a kingdom of David and empire of Solomon) is as fanciful as King Arthur and Camelot.

The basics of historical inquiry

I opened this post with a reference to the methods of historians in nonbiblical fields. In short, those methods are nothing other than any journalistic or forensic or “common sense” method of trying to find out “what happened” — minus the theological provenance from which the quest is embarked upon. Start with what we know to be the most secure “facts” on the basis of collating independent evidence and working from there. Assuming that what we read in the Bible is a pathway to “the historical facts” is not safe: we need the support of independent evidence. Unfortunately, our cultural heritage has taught us too well that certain narratives about the past are “facts” (or at least based on facts) so that we find it very difficult to remove these from our minds when trying to see clearly the material evidence before our eyes.

2024-03-12

The Problem with an Early Date for the Hebrew Bible

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Imagine digging down through centuries of layers at an archaeological site and suddenly finding an old smartphone. You would know it must have been planted there by some trickster. You would know that it could not be more than a few years old despite uncovering it in a layer supposedly centuries old.

I believe it can be shown that a similar problem faces us when we try to place the earliest writings of the Bible back into the times of King David and Solomon. Further, if we try to check how old the Biblical works are and use in principle the same type of reasoning as we intuitively use for dating the approximate era of the smartphone, we default to the Hellenistic period. That is an extreme comparison but in principle it is a valid one. I will try to demonstrate its validity by quoting (in translation) the words of the scholar who was the first to assign the earliest works of the Bible to the time of King Solomon.

I am referring to Gerhard von Rad. (I introduced von Rad in a post outlining the rise of the Documentary Hypothesis.) The chapter of his that I am using is Collected studies on the Old Testament (= Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament), specifically his 1944 chapter, The Beginning of Historiography in Ancient Israel (= Der Anfang der Geschichtsschreibung im alten Israel pp 148-188)

Von Rad begins:

For the modern peoples of the West, historiography is one of the most natural intellectual activities. It seems to us to be absolutely essential for a more intensive understanding of existence. In this respect, the peoples of the Western culture are students and heirs of both Greek and biblical historiography.

Does that opening not set off alarm bells? I am writing in the context of earlier posts addressing works of Niels Peter Lemche, Philippe Wajdenbaum, Russell Gmirkin and others who argue for dating the origins of the Hebrew Bible in the Hellenistic era. Von Rad begins by pointing out that the only comparable historical writing to the Bible is found among the Greeks.

It is easy to see that most ancient peoples did not achieve this form of a more intensive understanding of existence. . . . [T]hey didn’t produce any historiography.

Not the Egyptians?

The ancient Egyptians were characterized by a striking inability to think historically in the sense described above. Eminently conservative, eminently fond of writing, they always focused their reflections on the past in an antiquarian way on details and were unable to grasp larger contexts.

Nor the Mesopotamians?

But the cultures of Mesopotamia, no matter how eventful the history in this area was, did not create a representation of history that went significantly beyond individual documents of the type mentioned above. At best, one can speak of an attempt to grasp the course of historical events in a uniform manner using list science. But their strength failed when faced with the task of presenting and interpreting national history in a unified manner.

But what of the Hellenistic era Greeks?

It was only Berossus who attempted to write their history, long after the great empires had left the stage of history. But this only happened under Greek influence. . . . There are only two peoples who really made history in ancient times: the Greeks and, long before them, the Israelites.

Some of us will be reminded of a work that argued for the Hebrew Bible using the Hellenistic era work of Berossus as one of its sources:

Gmirkin, Russell. Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2006.

Interestingly, Gerhard von Rad noted that we do not have earlier primitive precursors to the historical writing we read in the Old Testament. The OT comes to us without known Hebrew forebears. It appears in a mature form, as if (my addition here) its forebears lay outside Palestine.

The “emergence” of ancient Israelite historiography cannot be described. It is there at a certain point in time, and it stands there before us in its most perfect form.

How to explain this sudden emergence of the historical writings — Genesis through to 1-2 Kings — of the Hebrew Bible? Von Rad posits three causes:

1. Israelites applied origin stories (etiologies) not only to local phenomena (e.g. various ethnic groups, an altar of stones, a deserted village) but to more universalistic themes: the place of women, why suffering, and so forth. This attention to “the basic facts of human existence” is thought to have given Israelites an edge in seeing the bigger picture of past events.

2. Israelites had an “overarching give of narrative exposition”. They could write simply yet powerfully.

3. Israelites, uniquely, had a monotheistic belief in a certain kind of God, a God who controlled all major human events. It wasn’t left up to demons or lesser sprites to direct human affairs but Yahweh himself.

You will probably be thinking that the above three explanations are really just other ways of describing what is begging for an explanation: why is it that historical writing as we see it in the Bible originated with Israelites, supposedly before the rise of Greek historical writing? The “explanations” also seem to suggest that the “Israelites” had qualities that set them apart from the rest of common humanity in their time.

For von Rad, it was particularly the religious beliefs of the Israelites that was the key factor. Their god was imagined to have a position over humanity that no other god in the minds of other peoples had — with the exception of the later Greeks.

The Israelites came to thinking about history and then to writing history from their belief in the power of God to make history. For them, “history is an event of God. God sets the movement in motion with his promise. He sets the target according to his will and he watches over her… All history comes from God and occurs for God” [quoting Regenbogen, Thukydides als politischer Denker]. We can already see here: it is a very unique historical thinking that we are now approaching, because the focus of events is not at all on the earthly stage; neither nations, nor kings, nor glorious heroes are the actual actors; and therefore, in the ultimate sense, they are not the subject of the representation. And yet all the immanent events are followed with breathless interest and the highest inner involvement, precisely because it is the field of activity of divine action. Herodotus also knows “metaphysical powers that have a moving effect on the world of earthly events through a diverse apparatus of signs, prophecies and dreams” [quoting Regenbogen]. . . .

For Herodotus it was the god Apollo who was overseeing and guiding the course of events in the struggle between the Greeks and Persians. Apollo’s oracle at Delphi functioned in a similar way to Yahweh’s Jerusalem. I once posted a brief outline of what other scholars have observed are overlaps between Herodotus’s Histories and the Bible’s “Primary History”: Correlations between the “Histories” of Herodotus and the Bible’s History of Israel.

Von Rad is always quick to try to point out where the Greek histories are unlike those in the Bible. I could discuss what he posits as significant differences but I want to focus here on the similarities and may do so in the near future. For example, he observes that the role of the divinity in guiding history is not as explicitly pervasive in Herodotus as it is in the Bible. I think such a difference is one of degree, not of kind.

Von Rad zeroes in on the biblical account of the rise of David to kingship and the rule of King Solomon as if that narrative is a historical record. He cannot conceive of it as fiction. It was written by a man full of godly character who is obviously documenting true events, so von Rad suggests:

We do not know the historian who described these events to us. He must have been a man who had precise knowledge of the circumstances and events at court. His descriptions breathe a closeness to life that makes any doubts about the reliability of his portrayal disappear. This author is characterized by a penetrating knowledge of human nature; His attitude towards David himself is particularly impressive. The figure of the king is everywhere drawn with warm sympathy and great reverence. However, the author has retained his freedom of judgment in the most unbiased manner. He never covered up the king’s guilt and failure. But even when he reports dark and ugly things with his “heroic truthfulness” that is unique in the Orient, he does not give in to the lasciviousness of gossip, but always remains chaste and noble. This leads us to the most important question, namely that of the theological and ideological content of his historiography.

The biblical description of the kingdom of David and Solomon is assumed to be historically valid: recall von Rad informing us of the ability of the biblical historian to write simply yet powerfully!

Von Rad explains that this history of David is told as a “secular” narrative with only three passages alerting us to God’s role behind the scenes. (He seems to be coming close to contradicting his earlier point that it was the theological emphasis that distinguished the Biblical historiography from that of the “more secular” Herodotus.)

[W]e have highlighted [in the account of David] the peculiarly secular way of presenting this historiography, for example in comparison to the naive belief in miracles in the heroic legend. This view of history and God’s actions in history must have been nothing short of revolutionary at the time.

King Solomon’s Court — Edward Poynter, 1890

And so we return to discovering the archaeologist unearthing a smartphone in a layer centuries old.

But to make this view of when the biblical history was written sound more plausible von Rad smooths out some of the edges of the idea of it being totally “revolutionary at the time”:

No matter how much one praises the originality and theological genius of our author, such a show also had to have its intellectual-historical prerequisites for the time, because in every historiography an “overall cultural consciousness” is presupposed.

Creativity does not arise without debt to preconditions of some kind.

So how to explain the appearance of this smartphone? For von Rad, it is not difficult:

It is really not difficult to understand this historiography in the context of the Solomonic era, within which it undoubtedly emerged. It was only in [this] epoch . . . that the new things that had already begun under David had a cultural impact on all sides. . . . Life began on a much broader cultural basis than was possible a generation ago. We hear from Solomon that he established large-scale trade relations with distant lands. Riches came into the land; luxury and well-being moved into the court and major building activity began. This flourishing economic life was naturally followed by an intensive intellectual exchange. At no time in the entire history of this people were the regulations against the importation of spiritual religious goods so liberally applied as in this era. The court was a foster home of international wisdom, like the Egyptian courts of old. The presence of so many foreigners gave rise to obligations which were readily fulfilled; places of worship were built for non-Israelite deities. In a word, the era of Solomon was an era of enlightenment, of the abrupt demolition of the old patriarchal order of life.

That’s interesting in a way, but it prompts me to ask what foreign influences, what other peoples of the day, contributed to this secular and broad new historiography? Herodotus had not been born yet. What were the specific types of ideas that other peoples of Solomon’s day contributed to Solomon’s court that led to such “intellectual enlightenment”?

The archaic institution of holy war, the simple form of worship at shrines with its cult legends were undermined by a flood of secular thinking. The cult legends broke away from their traditional attachment points and became literature. Don’t we also feel this cool touch of a modern, free and entirely non-cultic spirituality in our historical work at every turn?

What was it, one has to ask, about other cultures that enabled the birth of a “modern, free spirituality” in the days of Solomon? I doubt anyone can point to any work of literature, to any religious concept, among Israel’s neighbours that fostered such a modern concept.

I suggest that the simpler and more obvious answer should be found in the influence of Greek culture (both literature and ideas) that swept over the Levant and beyond after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

There is an English language version of Gerhard von Rad’s essay in From Genesis to Chronicles : explorations in Old Testament theology. See pages 125ff

2024-03-10

Four Ways Canaan Fell to Biblical Israel

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

In the first five books of the Bible there are four different ways God promises to give the land of Canaan to the Israelites. [I continue to write from the perspective argued by many scholars that the Bible’s narratives had multiple authors and that their respective stories did not always agree. In this post I make mention of conventional sources behind the biblical books (J, E, D…) but I do so mainly for convenience. I am aware that some scholarship has questioned the existence of these sources but my point here is that there are evidently different points of view being expressed in the Bible, however we might conceptualize them.]

Inheriting the land through natural population growth

In Genesis God promises Abraham that his descendants through Isaac will inherit the land and be a blessing to all nations roundabout. Genesis 12:2-3

I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you,and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

In the previous post we saw that ….

The patriarchs served for the writers and editors of Genesis as models of tolerance and coexistence with at least some segments of the native population. (Frankel, p. 325)

For the Genesis authors and editors,

The promise of the land was thought of in terms of hegemony over peoples who would derive blessing from Israel’s dominance, not in terms of eradicating all that is foreign. Only the “enemies” who cursed the descendants of Abraham would be cursed. (ibid.)

When Jacob was passing on future blessings to his sons he condemned the violence of Simeon and Levi in destroying the Canaanite city of Shechem. Genesis 49:5-7

Simeon and Levi are brothers —their swords are weapons of violence. Let me not enter their council, let me not join their assembly, for they have killed men in their anger and hamstrung oxen as they pleased. Cursed be their anger, so fierce, and their fury, so cruel! I will scatter them in Jacob and disperse them in Israel.

While Judah is honoured for taking tribute from his enemies (Gen 49:8-10) and the descendants generally will “possess the gate of their enemies” (Gen 22:17),

There is no basis . . . for understanding these blessings as indicating that all the inhabitants of the land are destined for expulsion or destruction, as implied both in Deuteronomy’s re-use of the patriarchal promise motif and in the pentateuchal conquest laws. Rather, the military aspect is included as an additional element in the achievement of dominion in the land. The blessing of proliferation goes hand in hand with overall dominion and control in the land, not with destruction of all that is “other.” The blessing to mankind of great proliferation is analogously combined with dominion over creation, not with its destruction (Gen 1:28; 9:1–7 116 ). The very fact that the seed of Abraham will possess the gate of their enemies rather than the inhabitants of the land indicates that not all the inhabitants of the land will be “possessed” as enemies. Some inhabitants, rather, will be taken on as allies, or covenant partners in one sense or another . . . . (Frankel, 312)

I’m not saying that the Canaanites and Israelites will be equal partners in this scenario. It is an “idealistic” scenario for the twelve tribes insofar as the Canaanites in the land will honour and submit to them while receiving the blessings God promised through his people. So theoretically everybody knows their place in relation to one another and all are being blessed accordingly.

Clearly, the text speaks of supremacy in the land and not total displacement of all inhabitants. Here too, those who bless Jacob and accept his dominance will be blessed. (Frankel, 313)

Genesis as an outlier

Genesis is not like the other books in the Pentateuch, however. Unlike those other books (Exodus to Deuteronomy) Genesis is about “the establishment of the permanent order of the cosmos and the relationships among [peoples]”. Unlike in other books, God in Genesis appears as a man, face to face, walking with humans, talking with them mostly in the broad daylight, without need of an intermediary prophet. The customs we encounter in the narratives of Genesis are unique: e.g. Genesis is not at all embarrassed in the way it depicts Rachel stealing Laban’s idols or in Joseph and Jacob being embalmed as per the Egyptian Osiris cult.

Nor does Genesis allude in any way to Israel’s unique religious status. Abraham is a God-fearing, just man; but neither in the promises made to him nor in those made to his descendants is the distinction of possessing YHWH’s Torah, or the fact that Ishmael and Esau will be idolaters mentioned. The religious rift that separates Israel from the nations, so prominent in the rest of the books of the Torah, is never hinted at in Genesis. Here, Israel’s distinction is purely one of lineage; it is “lord over its brethren” (27:29). True, there is a covenant between God and Israel’s ancestors; but its promises are purely ethnic: numerous progeny, territorial possessions, and kingship. (Kaufmann, 207)

The story we read in Exodus has only the slimmest connections with the central narratives about the patriarchs in Genesis.

[T]here is no reference at all to the constantly repeated promise of increase addressed to the fathers, of which the author is obviously not aware. The situation is even more striking with the first mention of the land into which it has been proclaimed, the Israelites are to journey after they have been rescued from slavery in Egypt. The text reads: ‘I will lead you into a good, broad land, into a land that flows with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites’ (3.8). The land is introduced here as an unknown land, and more, as a land that is the home of foreign nations; there is not a word which mentions that the patriarchs have already lived a long time in this land and that God has promised it to them and their descendants as a permanent possession. Following the terminology of the promise of the land in Genesis, those addressed here would be the ‘seed’ for whom the promise holds good. But they are not spoken to as such. (Rendtorff, 84f)

One may surely conclude that the authors behind this work were unaware of what others were writing/would write about Moses and Mount Sinai and Joshua’s conquests. (The passage in Genesis 15:13-16 prophesying of the Exodus reads most oddly out of place: it does not relate to the question Abraham has asked and that God is setting up to respond to. Many scholars see this passage as a late addition. Rendtorff’s observation (85): “This text stands in splendid isolation within the patriarchal story“.)

God will drive them out before/as the Israelites arrive

Exodus 34:11

Then the Lord said: . . . I am about to drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

Presumably the God imagines the Israelites crossing into the land before the native inhabitants have all fled so he goes on to warn his people not to make any covenants with them and to destroy all their cult statues. (This passage is said by many scholars to belong to the “J source” of the Pentateuch.)

Another passage, one scholars attribute to the “E source” within the Pentateuch:

Exodus 23:27-30

I will send my terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you encounter. I will make all your enemies turn their backs and run. I will send the hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.

So here it is God who removes the Canaanites:

The pre-Deuteronomic tradition speaks almost exclusively of the expectation that the displacement of the Canaanites would be accomplished by God. . . . The expulsion, J believed, was to have been carried out by Yhwh. . . . J imagined the promise to have been one of miraculous expulsion of the Canaanites; Israel’s only task was not to get in the way. . . .

. . . Yet in E, as in J, the actual expulsion of the existing population was to be carried out by God. In contrast to J, however, E speaks of a prediction that it would be done in stages. (Schwartz, 157)

God commands the Israelites to slaughter them all

Now we come to a strikingly different source, one that scholars call “D”. Here we find no compassion, no mercy, towards the Canaanites. The descendants of the patriarchs are expected to bloody their own hands

Deuteronomy 7:16

You must destroy all the peoples the Lord your God gives over to you. Do not look on them with pity and do not serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you.

Deuteronomy 20:16-17

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites — as the Lord your God has commanded you.

The Land itself will “vomit” them out

Leviticus 18:25-28

Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the foreigners residing among you must not do any of these detestable things, for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

Leviticus 20:22-24

Keep all my decrees and laws and follow them, so that the land where I am bringing you to live may not vomit you out. You must not live according to the customs of the nations I am going to drive out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them. But I said to you, You will possess their land; I will give it to you as an inheritance, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Here the land God is handing over to the Israelites is “a land flowing with milk and honey”. But if the people sin that land will “vomit them out”.

The land of Canaan, in H’s view [H is another source discerned by scholars, alongside J, E, D above], is a fertile and bountiful land unless it is contaminated by human transgression. When that occurs, its skies withhold their rainfall, desert winds wither its grain, armies of locusts descend upon it, its trees and fields fail to yield their produce, pestilence breaks out, and wild beasts roam the countryside—and its inhabitants, impoverished and plagued by hunger and thirst, must leave in search of greener pastures. (Schwartz, 166)

As Baruch Schwatz views these two passages in Leviticus, the author is imagining that the Canaanites will already have been driven out of the land because of their sins, and that the land will be punished with drought and crop failure by the time the Israelites arrive. The Israelites will therefore enter a land of milk and honey. But they must beware lest they also commit the same sins as the former inhabitants and the abundant land turns once again to desolation and in turn drives them out.

Conclusion

There are many voices in the Bible. The traditional Documentary Hypothesis has worked with the view that these different voices emerged over many generations and at some stage a group of editors sought to combine them in a single narrative or collection of books with an overall narrative. Once that combined work was finished, later editors with new ideas undertook to revise that narrative even more with further additions. Hence we have a work riddled with inconsistencies, contradictions, unfinished or obscure details, and so forth.

More recently some scholars have questioned aspects of the above model. Would not later editors with new ideas seek to eliminate accounts that they strongly disagreed with and produce a more coherent work? After all, that’s what the authors of 1-2 Chronicles did when they rewrote the history of the kings of Israel and Judah. Some scholars have suggested that a better explanation is that editors were attempting to combine into a single narrative multiple viewpoints of different interest groups. The technical terms are that a “synchronic” model of composition (stitching together multiple narratives from different ideological quarters, Levitical and Aaronide, Jerusalem and Samaria, etc) as opposed to the conventional “diachronic” (or multi-generational) model.

Baruch Schwartz has tackled this question in detail and in one of his areas of inquiry, the story of Joseph (Genesis 37) as a linking narrative designed to join the book of Genesis with that of Exodus, concludes in relation to that particular story (my bolded highlighting):

Our analysis demonstrates, first and foremost, that the process of composition of Gen 37 was essentially a canonical one, aimed at collecting, collating and preserving literary works already in existence. The outcome of the compilation process was determined — to the letter — by the pre-existing sources themselves. These were received by the compiler in the form of fully shaped, continuous and internally consistent written narratives, and the compiler viewed them as possessing a measure of sanctity that rendered it desirable, indeed obligatory, to refrain as much as possible from altering, detracting from or adding to them.

Genesis 37 in its canonical form shows no signs of being the result of creative narrative art, nor does it appear to be the work of ideologically or theologically motivated redactors who, having selected freely those sources and traditions that were best suited to their purposes, molded them into a new whole precisely as they wished. The compiler of Gen 37 had no say in determining either its content or its form; he was responsible neither for its themes and motifs nor for its religious teachings; he was not even at liberty to decide what to include and what to exclude. All of these aspects of literary license and creativity belong to the earlier stages in the formation of the Torah. . . .

The analysis of Gen 37 reveals further that no single source served as the underlying text to which the compiler added what he deemed appropriate from the other documents. The compiler did not use E as his Vorlage, adding to it whatever portions of J and P he felt that he needed, nor did he use J as his primary text, adding to it whatever he chose from E and P. He did not stratify, superimposing portions of a later document upon an earlier one or portions of an earlier one upon a later one. The unmistakable impression one receives is that the compiler attached equal weight to the two narratives — as well as to the opening segment from P, which he placed precisely where he was obligated to place it — and so he combined them by alternating between them, adhering meticulously to the principles of composition we have identified: maximal preservation of each source, strict chronological progression, avoidance of addition and deletion and continuing the thread of each narrative as long as possible, moving to the other thread at exactly the point when it becomes necessary to do so, not a single word earlier or later.

Finally and most crucially, our analysis reveals that the result arrived at by the compiler, the composite chapter in its canonical form, is, given the method that he evidently employed, the only possible result that could have been obtained. The final form of the chapter is not a function of the compiler’s ideological agenda, theological tendencies, aesthetic tastes, or artistic abilities. His role was confined entirely to the painstaking arrangement of the existing texts in combined form. The case of Gen 37 is in no way atypical; the composite narratives throughout the remainder of the Pentateuch all yield similar results.

Russell Gmirkin’s studies have placed both the disparate sources and the final compiler of those sources into the result we see today in the Hellenistic time-setting (see Plato and the Hebrew Bible and Plato and the Biblical Creation Accounts). Baruch Schwartz, from my understanding of his works, would place those sources much earlier. I may favour the Gmirkin’s Hellenistic provenance, but the account of how we arrive at such a final text (bound by a single narrative yet riddled with inconsistencies) as outlined above by Schwartz makes a lot of sense to me.

Frankel, David. The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel: Theologies of Territory in the Hebrew Bible. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2011.

Kaufmann, Yeḥezkel. The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile. Translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg. New York: Schocken Books, 1972.

Rendtorff, Rolf. The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch. London; Gordonsville: Sheffield Academic Press, 2009.

Schwartz, Baruch J. “Reexamining the Fate of the ‘Canaanites’ in the Torah Traditions.” In Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume : Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, Qumran, and Post-Biblical Judaism, edited by Chaim Cohen, Avi Hurvitz, and Shalom M. Paul, 151–70. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2004. https://www.academia.edu/39296080/Reexamining_the_Fate_of_the_Canaanites_in_the_Torah_Traditionshttps://www.academia.edu/39296080/Reexamining_the_Fate_of_the_Canaanites_in_the_Torah_Traditions

2024-03-09

How Patriarchs of the Jews Lived in Peace with Canaanites

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

We know all about the commands in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy ordering Israel to wipe out, annihilate, the Canaanites. The command was to tear down their altars, destroy their cities and avoid forming any alliances with them, certainly not to intermarry with them. The Book of Genesis is evidence that some of the authors of the biblical books had a very different view of how their neighbours should be treated. [I am writing from the perspective argued by many scholars that the Bible’s narratives had multiple authors and that their respective stories did not always agree.] In my previous post we saw that founding heroes were understood as models for how their reputed descendants ought to behave towards others. With that in mind, recall the following details from your Sunday School days….

Abraham

— made an alliance with Canaanites and joined with them to defeat foreign invaders: Gen 14:13, 24

— restored both the material losses and the political independence of the Canaanite cities: Gen. 14:16-24

— pleaded with God to save the Canaanite city of Sodom from destruction: Gen 18:23-33

— paid tithes to the priest of the god El Elyon in the Canaanite city of Salem: Gen 14:18-20

Abraham purchases field of Ephron the Hittite, Attrib Pierter Coeck van Aelst – Royal Collection Trust

— made a covenant with Philistines, promising peaceful coexistence between the Philistines and Abraham’s descendants: Gen 21:27, 31-34

— married a presumably local (Canaanite) woman and took local concubines: Gen 25:1, 6

— built new altars but never came into conflict with the religious practices of the Canaanites: Gen 12:6-8; 13:18

— publicly purchased land from the Hittites (who respected him as a “mighty prince”) for his and his wife’s burial: Gen 23:5-20; 25:7-10

The fact that the author depicts Abraham as purchasing the burial plot in public view of the Hittites in order to guarantee his claim to it against future Hittite claims (or Israelite claims that the site is foreign?) probably shows that, in contrast to the conquest laws, he considers the continuous presence of the Hittites in the land to be both obvious and normative. (Frankel, p. 286)

Isaac

— made a covenant with the Philistine Abimelech in the Canaanite city of Gerar: Gen 26:28-31

— repeatedly retreated when local Canaanite shepherds stole his well until there was enough room for everyone: Gen 26:19-22

Jacob

— reacted with horror and shame at the cruelty and injustice of his sons’ destruction of Shechem whose people had made generous offers to his family: Gen 34

Many scholars have demonstrated that the story of Dinah has several inner tensions. On the one hand, one finds several strong expressions of sympathy for Jacob’s sons and justification for the sack of Shechem. . . . On the other hand, the narrative seems to go out of its way to depict the people of Shechem as being wronged innocents. . . . All of these tensions have led several scholars to hypothesize that an original story depicting the sack of Shechem in negative terms was supplemented at a later date with the intention of justifying the harsh massacre. (Frankel, pp 294f)

One wonders if this narrative was composed as a rebuke to those who wished for the destruction of Canaanite cities.

Judah

— took a Canaanite woman and chose Canaanites to be his sons’ wives: Gen 38

Frankel, David. The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel: Theologies of Territory in the Hebrew Bible. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2011.

2024-03-07

The Age of Inventions of Mythical Histories — Greek and Biblical

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Some readers will be aware that I am sympathetic to the view that the books of the Old Testament were products of the Hellenistic era. I believe that sound historical methods involving critical analysis of assertions against evidence make such a late dating highly plausible. But it is also vital to be as fully informed as possible about alternative views that would date the origins of the Hebrew Bible to the Persian era or earlier. This requires looking at linguistic and textual arguments as well as archaeological studies. In coming posts I would like to address some of the readings in these areas that I have been undertaking as I have tried to catch up with old and recent publications. My aim will be to present various arguments in ways that are easily digestible for those of us with little time to study academic tomes and specialist papers.

Meanwhile, it will be of interest to some to know a little more about what the Hellenistic world was like for assessing the plausibility of works like Genesis and Exodus emerging from there.

Can we really imagine whole new histories and family genealogies being invented for particular groups of people?

Prof. Dr. Tanja Susanne Scheer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Let’s look at how the Greek world documented and even created new histories of origins during the Hellenistic era, that is after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330s-320s. This is nothing more than an introduction. I quote passages from Tanja S. Scheer’s contribution to A Companion to the Hellenistic World, “The Past in a Hellenistic Present: Myth and Local Tradition”. The first three subheadings are identical to those Scheer used. All bolded highlighting is my own.

Myth as History According to the Greeks

The relationship of Hellenistic Greeks to their past is shaped by much older traditions. In particular two important points characterize the relationship to the past: its genealogical structuring and its re-shaping by epic poetry. . . . Self definition as well as assessment by others are marked by genealogical connections. The past of his own family, of his home city, of his tribe defines the identity and status of the individual in the present . . . . [W]hole cities also prided themselves on their ancestors and founders. (216)

You are probably already reminded of the many genealogies and narratives to justify who’s who and where in the Bible, beginning with Genesis. Genealogies could be used to assert territorial claims but also to explain how related peoples were expected to support one another or know their respective status.

Were these genealogies historically true?

This pronounced Greek interest in ancestry and kinship was, however, not properly historical. The past was only of importance when it was marked by famous personalities or by deeds of mythical heroes. A family tree that ended with an anonymous smallholder was of little use. Even as proof of the great age of a family it could not offer much help: for great age only really began when the genealogy could be traced back to heroic times and thereby into the society of heroes or even gods . . .

Fact checking was not part of the agenda:

People were at a loss when confronted with written or archaeological discoveries from their own past, which chance had brought to light. The Greeks reconstructed the past not so much through concrete evidence from early times but rather with the help of their traditional stories, of myth. . . . Questions about the past led to heroic, not historically correct, answers . . . Already long before Hellenistic times, however, Greek logographers and historians had made the fictional events of epic the focal point of their history and accepted them as containing at least a core of truth. (217)

Ancestries of any worth always went back to the gods:

The habit of evaluating the qualities of individuals and even of cities on the basis of their ancestry understandably encouraged the desire to number the gods themselves — or at least the heroes of epic — among one’s own ancestors. (218)

Past and Present in the Hellenistic Period

There was, in addition, a moral or ethical aspect. The myths surrounding great ancestors were treated as exemplars of how their descendants were expected to behave. If Heracles had conquered Troy or Asian peoples then his descendants were expected to do the same; if Heracles had shown kindness to a city, his descendants were obligated to do likewise.

[T]he history of the family imposed an obligation. Thus the political writer Isokrates could present Herakles as a model for his descendant Philip . . . . The deeds of Herakles in the first conquest of Troy were used to legitimate, and also to oblige, Philip to carry out successful military action in the present — that is the campaign against the Persians . . . . (218)

. . . in the run up to the Persian Wars Persian envoys are supposed to have come to Argos in an attempt to win the Argives over to their side — by appealing to their mutual mythical ancestor Perseus . . . . (219)

(Some scholars have suspected the biblical stories of David’s conquests were created to justify Hasmonean conquests of their neighbours.)

The Greeks Abroad

As the Macedonians and Greeks advanced into new lands of old cultures they did not boast of “being the first” to discover these places; on the contrary,

. . . the stress was placed over and over again on familiar elements in these foreign lands: the geographical opening up of the world took place in the footsteps of great forerunners, of gods and heroes from the mythical past.

Throughout his campaign Alexander recognized Greek gods and heroes in foreign lands; he called on them pointedly and paid honour to them. . . .

In the case of Alexander’s campaigns this emphasis on the mythical past of the Macedonians and Greeks tended to integrate rather than exclude. The aim was by no means a one-sided ennobling of the Macedonians at the expense of the indigenous peoples whom they encountered. Family relationships based on myth did not have the function of an exclusive patent of nobility. Alexander and his generals endeavoured on the contrary to establish a connection between Greeks and Persians. (219)

Some will recall Russell Gmirkin’s discussion of the biblical patriarchs being at ease with local gods in Canaan, some of whom came to be identified with the Israelite deity.

Scheer notes that there was a practical power-play at work by this kind of integration of Greek and local gods:

This integrating use of the mythical past was not simply an unselfish mark of respect or recognition for non-Greek civilizations on the part of the Greeks. At stake surely was the need to prevent the Greek claim to power from appearing to the conquered as foreign rule. (219)

Note, further, that there are two different ways of treating non-Israelite locals (or Canaanites) in the Bible. Many of us know about the commands in Exodus and elsewhere to slaughter them all, or if that cannot be done then to have nothing whatever to do with them. But other narratives demonstrate the virtue of “Israel” being a blessing to foreigners, of peacefully coexisting with their neighbours. (I hope to elaborate on this point in a future post, along with the reasons for thinking that these two viewpoints were even contemporaneous.)

You will recall the stories in Genesis linking patriarchal figures to particular geographical areas where they would erect an altar or bury a family member. We might compare:

At least as important, however, was the opportunity for the Greeks to take mental possession of these new lands. In this aim the structure of the traditional stories of the Greeks was of considerable assistance. A common method of intellectual subjugation of unfamiliar lands consisted in making them accessible through eponymous heroes: every river, every tree, every region, according to the Greek view, was inhabited by local supernatural powers. Once the areas which they reached were mythically personalized, then the local family trees could easily be connected to well-known Greek heroes. . . . The foreign land was not really unknown: their own ancestors had after all once passed through it victoriously. . . . The cultivation of a mythical past was valuable for the Hellenistic present; even in the most far-flung foreign land traces of old familiar patterns could be discovered. Thus, the new world could be integrated into the old as something already familiar. (219f)

Creating Mythical Histories Continue reading “The Age of Inventions of Mythical Histories — Greek and Biblical”

2024-02-28

Bruno Bauer’s “Christianity Exposed” now open access

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Google Books has made Bruno Bauer’s famous “Christianity Exposed” public — though it is in German. BUT the even better news is that when I open it in Google Reader and run the cursor over the text a little box pops up giving me the option to have an instant translation of the selected text! Nice.

https://books.google.com.au/books/about … edir_esc=y Click on the Ebook link in the left margin.

2024-02-23

The Idol of Zionism, the Negation of Judaism — 1904

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Fortunately, I am not the only one raising my voice against the current, entirely misguided and long obsolete way of training rabbis. Protests are already being heard in rabbinic circles. However, not from the circles of the very youngest rabbis, who, trained in our days of chaplaincy, out of complete ignorance of the true essence of Judaism and despairing of its inner strength and future potential, throw themselves into the arms of the most recent day’s idol adorned with journalistic tinsel, called Zionism, which was recently aptly characterized by a perceptive scholar as the negation of Judaism. . . .

Original text:

Zum Glück bin ich nicht der einzige, der gegen die heutige, ganz verkehrte und längst verlebte Art, Rabbiner heranzubilden, seine Stimme erhebt. Es werden gegen dieselbe bereits in Rabbinerkreisen Proteste laut.Allerdings nicht in den Kreisen der allerjüngsten Rabbiner, die, herangebildet in unsern Tagen der Kaplanokratie, aus völliger Unkenntnis des wahren Wesens des Judentums und verzweifelnd an dessen innerer Kraft und Zukunftsstärke, sich dem jüngsten, mit journalistischem Flitter verbrämten Tagesgötzen, Zionismus genannt, den letzthin ein tiefblickender Gelehrter treffend als die Negation des Judentums charakterisierte, in die Arme werfen . . .

Friedländer, Moriz. Griechische Philosophie im alten Testament. Berlin: Reimer, 1904. http://archive.org/details/griechischephilo00frie. p. xvii

2024-02-14

How Moving Jesus’ Cleansing of the Temple to the Beginning of the Gospel of John Rebuked the Gospel of Mark

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by Neil Godfrey

Why did the author of the Gospel of John change the setting of Jesus driving out the money changers from the Temple from near the end of the gospel (where it is in all the other gospels) to place it near the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus? In those other gospels the episode serves as a plausible reason for the authorities to have Jesus arrested, tried and finally executed. But the Gospel of John has composed the account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead to provoke the religious authorities to capture and eliminate Jesus. The temple episode is shifted to near the beginning of the narrative. Why did the author do that?

Gary Greenberg — it’s been twelve years since I posted about GG’s views!

Gary Greenberg in a 2018 publication, Proving Jesus’ Authority in Mark and John: Overlooked Evidence of a Synoptic Relationship, proposes an interesting explanation. I will touch on a few of Greenberg’s key points but not attempt a full coverage of his extended and somewhat complex argument. (You may find the complexities count against Greenberg’s interpretation. Maybe, or maybe not: I leave those details aside here.)

In a nutshell, Greenberg suggests that the author of the Gospel of John opposed the Gospel of Mark’s image of Jesus achieving his great authority and fame because of his miracles and wanted to present Jesus astonishing the crowds because of the authority of his teaching, not his powers. In the Gospel of Mark Jesus begins his public career with exorcisms and healing miracles that attract followers to him throughout Galilee. In the Gospel of John Jesus’ first miracle (turning water to wine at the wedding) is a private affair known only to his disciples. The Gospel of John replaces Mark’s public miracles (casting out demons) with the cleansing of the temple (casting out money-changers) in Jerusalem and that action, along with his declaration of authority, becomes known throughout Galilee. In John’s gospel, Jesus denounces belief in him because of the miracles whereas in Mark’s gospel a positive impression is given of the power of miracles to attract people to Jesus.

Let’s start with the first miracle that propelled Jesus to fame according to the Gospel of Mark, generally recognized as the earliest of our canonical gospels. Greenberg’s larger argument is that the author of the Fourth Gospel knows the Gospel of Mark and is rewriting it according to a theological perspective that he (“John”) believes is more appropriate. (I have expressed a similar view in the past largely on the basis that the Gospel of John can be interpreted as a step by step undertaking to turn the Gospel of Mark “inside out”, so to speak. The most prominent example would be the replacing of Mark’s “messianic secret” — the theme that Jesus keeps his messianic identity secret from the general public until the very end — with John’s Jesus who loudly and regularly proclaims to all and sundry his messianic and divine identity.) But we begin with the Gospel of Mark because we see how the first miracles of Jesus there may well help explain why the author of John’s Gospel has replaced them with the Temple cleansing.

Both the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John begin with an encounter with John the Baptist. John points to Jesus in both gospels (though in different ways). In Mark Jesus goes on to call two pairs of disciples: Simon (Peter) and his brother Andrew, and then James and John. In the Gospel of John Jesus also calls two pairs of disciples: Peter and Andrew, and then Philip and Nathanael.

In the Gospel of Mark we then read about Jesus entering a synagogue, casting out a demon from one possessed, and thereby astonishing all onlookers at his power and authority.

Compare the effect of the cleansing of the temple on Jesus becoming famously known in Galilee: John 4:45 Then when he was come into Galilee, the Galilaeans received him, having seen all the things that he did at Jerusalem at the feast: for they also went unto the feast.

Mark 1:27-28

The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.” News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee.

From that moment on Jesus’ fame spreads like wildfire. Look at the details of note as set out by Gary Greenberg (with my own bolded highlighting) on page 78:

. . . At the beginning, we are told that the exorcism happened immediately after Jesus arrived at Capernaum. At the end, we are told that pursuant to this specific act, Jesus’ fame immediately began to spread throughout the Galilee for the first time. The exorcism takes place in between these two frames.
The story takes place in a Jewish place of worship, the synagogue in Capernaum.
The demon in this story is an “unclean spirit” that inhabits a human body. “Unclean” is the term used in the story. Although the nature of the infliction is not clearly spelled out, it appears that the body suffered from significant corrupting influences that need to be removed.
The spirit challenges Jesus’ authority to deal with it. “What have you to do with us?”
The demon knows who Jesus really is.
Jesus chased the corrupting influence out of the host body and out of the house of worship.
The story establishes Jesus’ authority to introduce “a new teaching.”
It establishes Jesus’ authority over unclean spirits (although it is not clear that this is a special power unique to Jesus.)
The crowds were amazed.
Jesus’ reputation in Galilee soared because of this first exorcism.

Now when Gary Greenberg examines the Gospel of John’s temple cleansing event, he senses in the following details intimations of Mark’s first exorcism story (pp 84f):

In both Mark and John, immediately after arriving in Capernaum for the first time, Jesus enters a Jewish house of worship. In Mark, this is the synagogue in Capernaum; in John, the Temple in Jerusalem [in John Jesus walks quickly through Capernaum on his way to Jerusalem]. (In John, this also fulfills Malachi’s prophecy about “the Lord” “suddenly” coming to the Temple.)
In both Mark and John, Jesus finds corrupting influences inside a house of worship that need to be chased away. In Mark, it is the “unclean spirit”; In John, it is the merchants.
In both Mark and John, the corrupting influence is associated with somebody’s body. In Mark, the “unclean spirit” inhabits a man’s body. In John, there is a gloss by the author saying that when Jesus referred to raising the Temple, “he was speaking of the temple of his body.” While John doesn’t precisely identify the Jerusalem Temple with Jesus’ body, he does create a literary situation in which the authorities mistakenly think that Jesus’ symbolic reference to his body is a direct reference to the Jerusalem Temple, which housed the corrupting influences.
In both Mark and John, Jesus introduces a new teaching that challenges traditional beliefs. Mark doesn’t say what Jesus said, but the congregation says that it is “a new teaching—with authority.” But in John we do get the content of a new teaching, to wit: “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” John’s new teaching challenges traditional Passover and religious practices in the Temple.
In both Mark and John, the corruptors challenge the authority of Jesus to confront them. In Mark, the demon says, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” In John, the authorities ask, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” In John, the challenge is raised after the expulsion by authorities who do not know who Jesus is. In Mark the challenge is raised before the expulsion by a demon who knows who Jesus is.
In both Mark and John, the corrupting influence was chased out of the house of worship. In Mark, it is the demon; in John, the merchants.
In both Mark and John, the non-corrupt onlookers recognize the authority of Jesus to deliver a new teaching.
In both Mark and John, immediately after the respective incidents, witnesses from Galilee spread word of Jesus’ actions, bringing him widespread fame and authority in Galilee for the first time.
In Mark, the exorcism serves as proof of the authority to introduce a new teaching. In John, the words of his teaching prove his authority.

The author of the Gospel of John was not impressed by Jesus performing exorcisms. After all, Luke (Luke 11:19) pointed out that exorcisms could be and were performed by just about anyone.

No, no “common” exorcisms appear in the Gospel of John. For the author of the Fourth Gospel, though Jesus performed unparalleled signs, Jesus would not trust anyone who followed him simply because of those signs. One had to register the word of truth itself from Jesus. In the Gospel of John Jesus constantly admonishes the necessity of following him because of his teaching, not because of his miracles. And exorcisms did not even rate as worthy of signs for the Johannine Son of God.

The Temple cleansing in Jerusalem is framed by Capernaum events that parallel those in the Gospel of Mark. To illustrate the first part of that frame ….

Gospel of Mark	Gospel of John
And they went into Capernaum (1:21)	After this He went down to Capernaum (2:12)
— First public act — exorcism of unclean spirit (1:22-26)	— First public act — temple cleansing (2:13-22)
— First public act made Jesus famous in Galilee for the first time (1:27-28) And they were all amazed, insomuch that they questioned among themselves, saying, What thing is this? what new doctrine is this? for with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him. And immediately his fame spread abroad throughout all the region round about Galilee.	— First public act made Jesus famous in Galilee for the first time (4:43-45) When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, for they also had been there.

I intend in this post to do nothing more than raise awareness of the possibility that the Gospel of John was using a counter-narrative to rebut the Gospel of Mark’s Jesus using miracles to demonstrate his authority and draw a following. In that context one might understand the fourth evangelist substituting the cleansing of the temple for the exorcism in the synagogue as Jesus’ first public act.

The first objection you probably have to the above is the fact that in John’s gospel the effect of the cleansing of the temple (described in chapter 2) on Jesus’ reputation in Galilee is not mentioned until chapter 4. Gary Greenberg answers that such readjustments were made in order to work a series of Jerusalem visits into the new account.

2024-01-31

The True Tale of How an Eagle, a Lion, a Man, and a Lot of Bull Entered the Church

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

As I was recently tossing out old papers that had accumulated over past decades I was amused to come across this old “gem” of mine. I posted it back in 1996 to a discussion forum for ex-members of an old cult I had once been a member of. It has no pretence at scholarly presentation. It is simply an off-the-cuff reflection on what I had been reading at the time about how the New Testament came into being. There are details in it that I would not fully stand by today but “for old time’s sake” here is what I wrote for a select audience 28 years ago.

(The reference to the Waldensians and Cathars had particular relevance to us cult and ex-cult members of the day — we curiously believed we were their heirs in some sense.)

THE TRUE TALE OF HOW AN EAGLE, A LION, A MAN, AND A LOT OF BULL ENTERED THE CHURCH

Following is a lengthy brief summary of why most Christians today can claim Mr Irenaeus, a bishop who lived about 130-200, as the reason for their New Testament Bibles. He was the one who began the invention of the New Testament. He did this in order to have a tool to preserve the power of the catholic bishops whenever they were confronted with nuisances who wanted to base their beliefs directly on the original teachings of Christ instead of relying on the traditions and authority of those bishops.

By mid second century, Christians were a pretty diverse lot without any concept of an “inspired” New Testament canon. The sabbath-observing portion of the Palestinian church accepted only the writings of Matthew; some docetist believers only used Mark; Valentinus’ followers accepted only the gospel of John; and others who followed Paul to his logical conclusions sought to uncover the original text of Luke and rejected all else as contradictory to what Christ and Paul taught three to four generations earlier. (Note that archaeology indicates that the average life-span of a lower-class Palestinian in the first century was about 30 years — a point that puts “late eyewitness” arguments in an interesting context.) And there were other gospels, too, as well as copies of the “Teachings of Christ”. Moreover, the reason a believer tended to follow only one gospel in opposition to the others was that that believer was convinced that the others contradicted his authority, and/or was a late forgery.

Out of all this confusion (or richly rewarding diversity for the more secure?) arose a powerful threat to the power of many established bishops. His name was Marcion, a brilliant thinker who rejected “human church tradition” as his authority and who sought instead to rely only on apostolic authority. He saw that the church had corrupted some of the original texts of Paul and Luke (modern scholars in this age when knowledge has increased have come to the same conclusions) and believed only what he read in their original texts, and not the traditions that the bishops said he should believe.

Many followed Marcion and his arguments against the traditions of the catholic bishops. He became a threat to the power of these bishops. Then the bishops found a defender and saviour of their power, position and traditions in Irenaeus.

(Some who read this will by now be jumping up and down wanting to argue that Marcion was a gnostic heretic. As you wish, but my point is that he was a powerful influence in the second century church and many believers were persuaded that he was truer to the original teachings of Jesus than the traditions that had developed among the bishop-ruled church. Recall that his enemies were the fathers of those who were the enemies of the Waldensians, and the Waldensians were also accused of gnosticism.)

Irenaeus did not have the same incisive and logically detailed mind as Marcion, but he did have faith and a determination to preserve and extend the authority and traditions of the bishops over believers. Disregarding the contradictions among the various gospels he stridently argued that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John should ALL be accepted as authoritative, basically because of his assertion that the traditions that he personally accepted about them were true. (He was not interested in historical or textual research as Marcion was, and many of those traditions have since been shown to have very little merit indeed.) Of course by blanketly asserting the authority of these four, Irenaeus was also partly opening the way for most dissidents (who believed in at least one of them) to return to the fold.

And to those who did not accept the authority of the bishops, he “proved” his point by powerfully demonstrating that they coincided with the four winds and corners of the earth. But wait, there was more! Each could, with a little ingenuity, be fitted with a nicely matching mythological head — eagle, lion, man and bull. (Later generations had a lot of trouble with Irenaeus’s taste in hybrids, though, and kept swapping these heads around to try them out on different gospel torsos from the ones to which Mr I. had attached them.)

So there! This was the catholic bishop’s answer to those hard questions about contradictions in the texts and evidence of late and spurious authorship and editing. Marcion had been seeking to rely exclusively on the original teachings of one apostle. Irenaeus saw the danger of this to the authority of the bishops and used his episcopal authority to declare non-apostolic authors as authoritative, too. (e.g. Mark and the late revised edition of Luke). This showed that the apostles were not so special after all, and that the bishop-led church (not the apostles) had the right to decide what traditions, writings and doctrines people should believe. No more Marcionites or Ebionites or others who snubbed their noses at the tradition and authority of the bishops in preference for their exclusively “apostolic” authority!

And that is why today we still all believe that those four gospels alone are authoritative. (It was quite some time after Irenaeus that they actually introduced the idea that they were “inspired” or “God-breathed”. And later on, after the dust had settled, the more imaginative theologians could be given the job of making up a whole lot of stuff so that their blatant inconsistencies — and any tell-tale signs of spurious authorship and later unauthorized editing — could be “harmonized” away.)

Irenaeus carried the flag for the authority of the catholic bishops and introduced the idea that the church would eventually have to finalize a New Testament canon if the bishop’s power were to be maintained against smart-alecs who sought to uncover and rely exclusively on the original words of Christ and/or any of the apostles.

In future generations, Christians could claim that there was an undisputed tradition in the church that these four gospels were penned by two genuine, original apostles and two genuine off-siders of another two apostles. Well, there was such a tradition at least from the second century, I guess, IF one accepts that the incipient Catholic Church of the third century was the only church worth considering, and if they further acknowledge the authority and teachings of the bishops of that Church.

But even if that is the case, then one has to wonder why Irenaeus did not include a whole lot of other writings that we now have in our New Testament — if indeed there was such an indisputable tradition — not to mention why other texts he believed were authoritative were subsequently dropped and lost altogether.

2024-01-28

Where does John the Baptist fit in History? — The Evidence of Josephus, Pt 7

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Continuing and concluding…..

Peter Kirby cites an argument for interpolation not from a source agreeing with the argument but rather from a source disposing of it. He quotes Robert Webb:

A second argument is that the nouns used for ‘baptism’ in this text (βαπτισμός and βάπτισις, Ant. 18.117) are not found elsewhere in the Josephan corpus, which may suggest that this vocabulary is foreign to Josephus and is evidence of interpolation. However, we may object that using a word only once does not mean it is foreign to an author. Josephus uses many words only once . . . .

(Webb, p. 39)

I try to make a habit of always checking footnotes and other citations to try to get my own perspective on the sources a book is referencing. If one turns to a scholar who is agreeing with the argument that Webb is addressing, one sees that Webb has presented the argument in a somewhat eviscerated form. Here is how it is presented by a scholar who is trying to persuade readers to accept it as distinct from Webb’s format that is aiming to persuade you to disagree with it.

Against this, it seems that scholars try to blur the fact that this brief passage also contains unique words unparalleled in any of Josephus’s writings, notably words that, as I shall attempt to prove, are semantically and conceptually suspect of a Christian hand — βαπτιστής, βαπτισμός, βάπτισιν, έπασκουσιν, αποδεκτός.

(Nir, p. 36)

I covered the bapt- words in the previous post so this time I look at the other two, έπασκουσιν (as in “lead righteous lives”) and αποδεκτός (as in “if the baptism was to be acceptable“) along with some others. Keep in mind that what follows is sourced from Rivka Nir’s more detailed discussion in her book The First Christian Believer, and all the additional authors I quote I do so because Nir has cited at least some part of them. (To place Rivka Nir in context see my previous post.)

έπασκουσιν (ep-askousin = labour/toil at, cultivate/practise): άρετήν ἐπασκουσιν = lead/practise righteousness/virtue

The word appears in this section of the John the Baptist passage:

For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews who lead [επασκουσιν] righteous lives and practise

justice towards their fellows and piety toward God to join in baptism . . .

There are two possible interpretations here. Should we translate the passage to indicate

John was exhorting Jews to practice, labour at, lead virtuous and righteous lives and so undergo baptism?

should the scene be translated to indicate that John is commanding those Jews who were known for their righteousness and special virtue to be baptized (for the consecration of their bodies, since they had already become righteous through their living prior to baptism)?

Scholarly opinions are divided. Rivka Nir takes the side of those who interpret it in the latter manner: John is addressing a sectarian group who “practise” a righteous way of living and telling them to be baptized. What is in Nir’s mind, of course, is that the author of this passage was from such a sectarian community.

That we are dealing with an elect group is equally evident in how the passage depicts John’s addressees, whom the author designates as ‘Jews who lead righteous lives and practice justice towards their fellows and piety towards God’. This description lends itself to two readings. Most read the two participles forms έπασκουσιν [lead, practise, labour at] and χρωμένοις as circumstantial attributives modifying the exhortation itself.

Nir, p. 49

It can be interpreted to mean EITHER that John is exhorting Jews to lead righteous lives OR that John is exhorting Jews who lead righteous lives to undergo baptism. In this case the Jews spoken of are initiated into a community…. (See below for the grammatical details of these two possible interpretations.)

A cult defined by righteousness

If we follow the second reading, that the passage is depicting a call for a sectarian group that is identified as “labouring at, practising” righteousness to undergo and “join in” baptism. But if that is the case, what is so distinctive about “righteousness” in this context? Here again scholarly analysis has opened up insights the lay readers like me might easily miss. Righteousness in this context is not a common morality or keeping the rules of the Pharisees or Temple authorities. It is even used in the New Testament to distinguish between the Christian “righteous” sect and the “superficially/hypocritically righteous” Pharisees, scribes and Sadducees. The same is found in the Qumran scrolls. “Righteousness” can denote a sectarian identity. Nir, pp. 50f:

John Kampen examined the term ‘righteousness’ in the Qumran scrolls. He reached the conclusion that unlike its usage in tannaitic sources to denote charity and mercy, at Qumran it denoted sectarian identity and belonging to an elect group having exclusive claim to a righteous way of life. Matthew applies this term in the same sense, in connection to John’s baptism (3.15; 21.32). as well as in the Sermon on the Mount (5.10-11), where the author urges a sectarian way of life distinguished by righteousness. In other words, righteousness marked the sectarian identity of the group and served to preserve its boundaries.⁵⁶ In this passage, as with Matthew and the Qumranites, ‘righteousness’ defines the lifestyle of this elect sectarian group as well as the boundaries separating it from society at large.

56. J. Kampen. “‘Righteousness’ in Matthew and the Legal Texts from Qumran’, in Legal Texts and Legal Issues: Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies. Cambridge 1995. Published in Honour of Joseph Μ. Baumgarten (ed. Μ. Bernstein, F. Garcia Martinez and J. Kampen; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997). pp. 461-87 (479, 481, 484, 486); Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition, p. 36: ‘The word δικαιοσύνη does not spill out by accident; it is Matthew’s peculiar way of designating the faith and life of Christians and of Christianity in general (cf. Mt. 5.6. 10; 6.1-4). Meier (A Marginal Jew, II. p. 61) points out the resemblance between John’s description in Josephus and in Lk. 3.10-14. which portrays him as exhorting to acts of social justice. This may be accountable to two Greek-Roman writers, Josephus and Luke, who independently of each other sought to describe an odd Jewish prophet according to the cultural models known in the Greek-Roman world. Similarly, Ernst, Johannes der Täufer, p. 257.

Those footnoted references are not the easiest for lay readers to locate but I have copied extracts from a couple of them. See below for the full passages being cited in footnote 56.

The passage does not simply say that John’s followers were obeying the Jewish traditions, but that they were “practising” a righteousness that set them apart from others and that qualified them to enter the cultic community through baptism, a baptism that would, because they were practicing this righteousness, also ritually sanctify their bodies.

A further pointer to the passage being written from the perspective of a distinctive cult practice, a cult that Nir finds signs of in Qumran, the Fourth Sibylline Oracle and various (anti-Pauline) Jewish-Christian sects, is the language used to express the disciples “coming together”, “joining” in baptism.

βαπτισμω συνιεναι : join in baptism

For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews who lead [επασκουσιν] righteous lives and practice [χρωμένοις] justice towards their fellows and piety toward God to join in baptism [βαπτισμω συνιεναι]. . . . When others too joined the crowds about him, because they were aroused [ήρθησαν] to the highest degree by his sermons, Herod became alarmed.

What commentators have discerned here is that the “joining” in baptism means entering into membership of a sectarian group, indicated by the inference that the call is for all of those who practise righteousness to gather together in a (collective) baptism. See details below.

Others, too, joined : Who were the others?

According to Meier in A Marginal Jew, II, pp. 58f

At first glance, the previous concentration of the passage on “the Jews” as the audience of John’s preaching might conjure up the idea that the unspecified “others” are Gentiles. There is no support for such an idea in the Four Gospels, but such a double audience would parallel what Josephus (quite mistakenly) says about Jesus’ audience in Ant. 18.3.3 §63 (kai pollous men Ioudaious, pollous de kai tou Hellenikou epegageto). However, if we are correct that epaskousin [ἐπασκουσιν] and chromenois [χρωμένοις] in §117 express conditions qualifying tois Ioudaiois, there is no need to go outside the immediate context to understand who “the others” at the beginning of §118 are.

So Meier concludes that the “others” were from the general Jewish population coming to see the righteous community respond to John’s call for baptism, but there is also a possibility that “others” might also refer to Gentiles, as in the Testimonium Flavianum (Ant. 18.63): ‘He [sc. Jesus] won over many Jews and many Greeks’, as well as Christians: Mt. 27.42: Lk. 7.19: Jn 4.37: 10.16: 1 Cor. 3.10: 9.27.

For O. Cullmann (‘The Significance of the Qumran Texts for Research into the Beginnings of Christianity‘. JBL 74 (1955). pp. 213-26 (220-21), such Hellenistic Christians formed the earliest nucleus of Christian missionaries who carried the gospel to Samaria and other non-Jewish areas in the Land of Israel.

Nir, p. 50

For baptism to be αποδεκτός (acceptable) . . .

In this passage, John says that ‘if baptism was to be acceptable [αποδεκτήν αύτώ]’ to God.⁶⁰ ‘they must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed, but as a consecration of the body’.

What kind of baptism might ‘be acceptable’ to God?

In biblical usage, this expression relates to the sacrificial system at the temple to designate an offering accepted by God.⁶¹ In the New Testament, the compound adjective αποδεκτός, meaning ‘acceptable’, occurs in connection with sacrifices only in 1 Peter: ‘spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God’ (2.3-5). . . .

The author of this passage speaks of John’s baptism in terms paralleling the atonement sacrifices in the temple, by means of which individuals ask God’s acceptance of their offering that their sins may be forgiven. Joseph Thomas⁶⁴ focused on one of the features of Baptist sects (Ebionites, Nazarenes, Elcasaites) that withdrew from the traditional temple and sacrificial worship and conceived of baptism as a substitute for sacrifices. To his mind, cessation of sacrifices and the baptismal rite are interrelated: instead of sacrifices in atonement for sins, it is holy baptism that atones for sins.⁶⁵The notion of baptism as replacement for the Jewish sacrificial system is distinctly Christian: Jesus is the expiatory sacrifice in place of the temple sacrifices and his death atones for all the sins of the world.⁶⁶ By baptism, the baptized identify with Jesus’ atoning sacrifice, becoming a sacrifice themselves, and their sins are forgiven, as expounded in Rom. 6.2-6.

61. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet, pp. 166, 203.

64. Thomas. Le mouvement Baptiste, pp. 280-81: J.A.T. Robinson, ‘The Baptism of John and the Qumran Community’, HTR 50 (1957). pp. 175-91 (180).

65. Thomas. Le mouvement Baptiste, pp. 55-56: Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet, p. 120. On baptism in place of sacrificing al Qumran, see subsequently.

66. Eph. 5.2: Rom. 12.1.

Nir, pp. 51f

In the account in Josephus we read that for John’s baptism to be “acceptable” (αποδεκτος) it must not be used to grant forgiveness of sins but for the consecration or sanctification of the body, a function of erstwhile temple sacrifices.

Baptism, a central rite

John’s baptism was being preached and proclaimed, a point in common between Josephus and the Gospels. The Gospel of Matthew underscores the central importance of baptism when he has Jesus command his disciples to go into the world and baptize new disciples.

Moreover, other scholars have wondered why Josephus did not explain the term “baptism” here.

What would Greek and Roman readers unfamiliar with Christian sources understand by this term? They were familiar with the verb βάπτω, which means ‘to dip/be dipped’ or ‘to immerse/be submerged’, and with the verb βαπτίζω, which in classical sources denotes ‘to immerse/be submerged under water’.⁴⁹ How would they understand a designation referring to someone who immerses others with this particular immersion? How could Josephus use this designation without defining it?⁵⁰

Moreover, this passage uses two terms for John’s immersion: βαππσμός and βάπτισις. which Christian tradition applied as distinctive of Christian baptism. And it is only here that they occur in Josephus, diverging markedly from the terminology he applies to the Jewish ritual immersion for purification from external physical defilement.⁵¹

49. Metaphorically: soaked in wine. See Oepke. ‘βάπτω’, TDNT, I. p. 535.

50. This bewilderment was already raised by Graelz (Geschichte der Juden. III. p. 276 n. 3): and Abrahams (Studies in Pharisaism, p. 33) noted that this designation might be an interpolation. Mason (Josephus and the New Testament, p. 228) attempts to distinguish between ‘Christ’ and ‘called the Christ’, as in the latter case Josephus would not need to explain the title, and this applies to John, ‘called the Baptist’. Some argue (e.g. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet, pp. 34, 168) that John’s being called by this name in the Gospels and in Josephus proves it became distinctive of John and the permanent Greek designation, hence its usage by the evangelists as well as Josephus. Indeed, John is called ‘the Baptist’ in the Synoptics, but this epithet is not attached to his name in Acts and in the Fourth Gospel.

51 To describe Jewish immersions, Josephus usually uses the verb λούεσθαι or άπολούεσθαι, as he does for the Essenes and Bannus; see K.H. Rengstorf, A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus (Leiden: EJ. Brill. 2002). I. p. 290. But βάπτισις is a term Christian sources apply to the baptism of Christ or Christian baptism; see Athanasius Alexandrinus, Quaestiones in scripturas 41 (M.28.725A); LPGL, p. 284. Origen uses βαπτισμός for John’s baptism, but in many sources this term applies to Christian baptism in general: see Heb 6.2: βαπτισμών διδαχής; Col 2.12: ‘you were buried with him in baptism (έν τω βαπτισμώ), you were also raised with him’; Chrysostom, Hom. in Heb. 9.2 ( 12.95B). This term also applies to the repeated baptismal rites of heretical sects, e.g., Ebionites, Marcionites, etc. See LPGL, p. 288. On the possibility that John’s baptism in Josephus was also a repeated ritual, see subsequently.

Nir, p. 48

It is through discussions of such technical points that Nir argues for a Jewish-Christian provenance of the John the Baptist passage in Antiquities of the Jews. When criticisms against the interpolation view point to comparisons with specific New Testament terminology they are missing a key facet of the argument: the interpolation is said to be consistent with certain Jewish Christian practices and thus contrary to the Christian ideas represented by the New Testament.

I still have some questions about Rivka Nir’s presentation but I have tried to set it out in these posts as fully (yet succinctly) as I reasonably can. The less background knowledge we have the easier it is to be persuaded by new readings. The more we learn about the Jewish and Christian worlds in their first and second century contexts the more aware we become of just how little we really know and how vast are the gaps in our knowledge. There is little room for dogmatism, for certainty, for “belief”, in a field of inquiry where even the sources themselves are not always what they seem. That’s true of much ancient history and it is especially true of the history of Christian origins.

So where does John the Baptist fit in history?

Our most abundant historical sources are Christian. In the canonical gospels John the Baptist is the prophetic voice announcing the advent of Jesus. He is depicted variously as a second Elijah, an Isaianic voice in the wilderness, and as the son of a temple priest. Always he represents the Jewish Scriptures prophesying their fulfilment in Jesus Christ. As such, he functions as a theological personification.

If John’s literary function is to personify a theological message we might think that he could still be more than a literary figure. Could he not also have had a historical reality? Yes, of course he could. But a general rule of thumb is to opt for the simplest explanation. If we have a literary explanation for the presence of John the Baptist that explains all that we read about him in the gospels, then there is no need to seek additional explanations. If there is independent evidence for John in history then we are in quite different territory.

The earliest non-Christian source we have is found in Antiquities 18.116/18.5.2 (by Josephus). If this passage was indeed penned by Josephus or one of his scribal assistants then it would be strong evidence — strong because it is independent of the gospels and in a work of “generally reliable” historical narration — that there was a John the Baptist figure in history, however that figure might be interpreted.

The passage would not confirm the gospels’ theological role of John. After all, in Josephus the JtB passage is set some years after the time of Jesus and Jesus is never mentioned in relation to John.

In the eyes of some scholars, those stark differences from the gospels stamp the passage with authenticity. This would mean that Christian authors took John from history and reset him in time to make him a precursor of Jesus. If this is how John entered the gospels then the common notion among scholars of Christian origins and the historical Jesus have no grounds on which to reconstruct a historical scenario in which Jesus joined the Baptist sect only to break away from it. John would then remain as nothing more than a theological personification of the OT pointing to fulfilment in Christ.

But if there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the passage in Josephus is from a Jewish-Christian hand, then we are left without any secure foundation for any place of such a figure in history. Another proposal is that the passage is genuinely Josephan but removed from its original context where it spoke of another “John” from the one we associate with Christian tradition. What is certain is that the passage raises questions. It is susceptible to debate. It can never be a bed-rock datum that establishes with certainty any semblance of a John the Baptist figure comparable to the one we read about in the gospels.

Detailed explanations of linked points above……

Continue reading “Where does John the Baptist fit in History? — The Evidence of Josephus, Pt 7”

2024-01-27

Where does John the Baptist fit in History? — The Evidence of Josephus, Pt 6

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Continuing, with an interlude ….

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. . . . It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St Jude’s, goes round to a friend at St Jude’s to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. — E. H. Carr, p. 23 of What is History?

I have been referring mostly to Rivka Nir’s arguments and attempting to demonstrate that they have not been accurately represented by various critics, both scholars and lay. It’s time to take a step back before I set out my final detailed post in which I will look at some specific details of Nir’s attempts to persuade readers that the John the Baptist passage in Josephus’s Antiquities is a Christian interpolation. First, though, let’s backtrack a little and try to explain where I have been coming from.

Who is Rivka Nir?

To get some idea of the sorts of themes she explores in her various publications have a look at her Open University of Israel page. What will probably strike you is the number of major research efforts into exploring the Christian provenance of various “Jewish” texts. (Are they really Jewish or are they Christian in origin? Or are they Jewish with Christian interpolations? Or do they represent a Jewish set of concepts we had mistakenly assumed were unique to Christianity? )

Some of those titles:

Joseph and Aseneth. A Christian Book
The Hiding of the Vessels of the Temple in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch – A Jewish or a Christian Tradition?,
Paraleipomena of Jeremiah-A Jewish or a Christian Composition
Aseneth as the ‘Prototype of the Church of the Gentiles
Aseneth – Jewish Proselyte or Christian Convert?
“Good Tidings” of Baruch to the Christian Faithful
The aromatic fragrances of Paradise in the Greek life of Adam and Eve and the Christian origin of the composition
The Appearance of Elijah and Enoch ‘before the judgment was held’ (1 Enoch, 90: 31) – A Christian tradition?,
“It is not right for a man who worships God to repay his neighbor evil for evil” Christian Ethics in Joseph and Aseneth (chapters 22-29)

In that context, a book arguing that John the Baptist had no historical Jewish antecedent, that he was entirely a Christian creation, should not come as a surprise.

It is Efron who appears to have persuaded Nir that the John the Baptist passage in Josephus is a forgery. At one place, for instance, Nir writes:

As to the Josephus-like vocabulary and style used by the writer of this passage, a Christian forger would necessarily be conversant with Jose phus’s language and style of writing if he wanted to insert this passage without making the forgery conspicuous. Such usage merely proves ‘the imitative linguistic skill ofthe Christian editor, who strove after appearance and attired the imagined testimony with an authentic “Flavian” facade’.¹⁷

17. Efron, Formation of the Primary Christian Church, p. 184.

Another point of interest one will notice in that university page is Rivka Nir’s debt to Joshua Efron, another scholar whose views on the authenticity of certain Josephan passages have been discussed on this blog. Nir has acknowledged Efron’s influence:

This research and its methodological principles are based on what I learned from my teacher, Prof. Joshua Efron, who has been my guide and source of inspiration since I began my academic studies. It was at his lectures at Tel-Aviv University during the 1970s that I first heard about the Christianity of the Apocalyptical Literature that constitutes the core of the so-called the “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.” He was then a rather isolated voice who used to refer to Marinus de Jonge’s work The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs as an example of another modern researcher who had arrived to similar conclusions. . . .

— p. 14 of her doctoral thesis, The Destruction of Jerusalem and the Idea of Redemption in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch

And in the Preface to The First Christian Believer:

In my research, I subscribe to Efron’s view that even if the apocalyptic vision had its roots in the Hebrew Bible, the apocalyptic composition, focused on the drama of the End, was born within Christian theology. . . . .

Over the years I have forged my own independent position on different aspects of New Testament research and somewhat moderated Efron’s resolute conclusions, particularly as concerns the identity of the Qumran sect and its place in Jewish society of the Second Temple period. Nonetheless, I essentially follow his research method and apply it in my approach to historical sources.

So yes, we might be justified in concluding that Rivka Nir is “predisposed” to making a case for the Josephan John the Baptist passage being a forgery, an interpolation from a Christian scribe. Biased!

Meeting Intellectual Bias with Honesty and Humility

Does that mean her arguments are therefore invalid? Of course not. Other scholars, we might equally conclude, are predisposed for any number of reasons to work with the conventional wisdom, within the Christian tradition. Bias of some kind is probably inevitable for any scholar. That’s why we see so often reminders of the importance for a scholar to recognize and to acknowledge their biases. An educated reading of any scholarly work will also mean looking for and identifying the assumptions and biases, even if they are not explicitly stated by the authors, in their books and essays.

When we see different scholars approaching historical sources from different perspectives and coming to different conclusions about the authenticity or provenance of certain pieces of data or passage, then we are obliged to acknowledge that there are sometimes more than one reasonable interpretation of a particular passage in a source.

We can follow debates between the interpretations of opposing perspectives and declare a strong preference for, or even a “belief”, in one view over another. But that preference can never remove the fact that “our view” is not the universally accepted one.

Does that mean there is nothing we can know for certain about history? No. Historians can still use the works of Josephus as an authentic source for how one educated Jew sought to present Jewish history to a Roman audience. The authenticity of most of the information is not suspect. The debates and opinions will be over selected details in the sources. That the authenticity of a few passages are problematic in the eyes of some scholars only means that we cannot have the same level of certainty about them as we do for other passages.

The same questions appear in other areas of historical study. Our surviving manuscripts of the Greek historian Herodotus likewise contain debated passages, one of which has been suspected of being an interpolation subsequent update to the original work to rebut the later historian Thucydides! (Though in this case the “interpolation” or “redaction” is thought to have been made by the original author.)

So what’s the problem? My problem is with scholarship that constructs historical reconstructions on the basis of specific data in the sources that they present as if they were uncontroversial raw facts — as if the debates over those passages among their peers do not exist or are irrelevant. That is, my problem is with what I see as intellectual dishonesty (or is it intellectual arrogance?) from those who know better.

Surely the appropriate way of handling debated data is to explain that it is open for debate and to argue from it accordingly, provisionally, hypothetically. One may disagree with one side of the debate but one can hardly proceed as if there is unquestioned certainty and the debated status can be ignored because one disagrees with the other side.

Most scholars agree…

Another cop-out I have to confess to hating is the line “Most scholars agree that Josephus wrote something about X” when that majority opinion is offered as an excuse to accept that agreement as bed-rock fact. Most of those scholars, surely, must know that what “most scholars agree” on has varied with time even though the data on which the agreement or disagreement is based has not changed at all. So we enter the field of the sociology of knowledge and why it is that certain interpretations win out at certain times over others. Historical factors, societal changes and geo-political movements, and more locally, the specifics of the backgrounds of persons who hold the entry-keys to major publishing outlets.

Enough of these motherhood doodlings. Next post I hope to finish addressing what I have considered to be one-sided discussions (despite the evidence demonstrating the disingenuous nature of protestations to the contrary) of the interpolation thesis for the John the Baptist passage in the writings of Josephus.

2024-01-24

Where does John the Baptist fit in History? — The Evidence of Josephus, Pt 5

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Continuing ……

Peter Kirby focussed on the following point in his article arguing for the authenticity of the John the Baptist passage in Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus:

(14) The Word for “Baptism” in the Passage Uncharacteristic of Christian Usage

Kirby cited the scholar Robert Webb who pointed out that the words for “baptism” in the John the Baptist passage in Josephus’s Antiquities (βάπτισις, βαπτισμός), are not the typical “Christian” words and concluded therefore that it is unlikely that this passage came from the pen of a Christian interpolator. I put “Christian” in inverted commas because Webb conflates “Christian” with New Testament literature. But of course Christians produced much literature beyond what is found in the NT that sheds light on this question.

Peter Kirby quoted and elaborated on Webb’s point but overlooked Rivka Nir’s rebuttal of Webb — even though he selectively critiqued the same article by Nir later in his post. Nir wrote:

It is true that the passage does not use βάπτισμα, the most common term for Christian baptism. But the two terms — βάπτισις and βαπτισμός — likewise denote Christian baptism. On βάπτισις see Athanasius Alexandrinus, Quaestiones in Scripturas 41 (PG 28, col. 725); Sozomenus Salaminus, Historia ecclesiastica 2.34, I (PG 67, col. 1029); Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, p. 284; on βαπτισμός see Heb. 6.2; Chrys. Hom. Ad Heraeos 9.2 (PG 63, col. 78). And especially important for my thesis is its use of heretical ablutions. On frequent ritual washing of Ebionites: Epiph. Haer. 30.2 (PG 41, col. 408); on Marcionite repetition of baptism for remission of post-baptismal sins, see Epiph. Haer. 42.3 (PG 41, col. 700); on Sampsean baptism, see Epiph. Haer. 53.1 (PG 41, col. 960). See Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, p. 288.

(Nir, p. 35)

So let’s see those references. Yes, they are later than Josephus (as is most of the NT, I think most would agree) . . .

Athanasius Alexandrinus, Quaestiones in Scripturas 41 (PG 28, col. 725 [scroll to page 5, see there τὴν βάπτι σιν] — a fourth century source. Too late, you say? Sozomenus Salaminus is even later — early fifth century. Lampe’s Lexicon?

p. 284:

p. 288

Hebrews 6:2

βαπτισμων διδαχης επιθεσεως τε χειρων αναστασεως τε νεκρων και κριματος αιωνιου

Of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.

I have not been able to find very quickly Greek texts of the other sources so if anyone would like to help out there feel free to contact me with the links. (English language texts are easy to find.)

Webb writes:

Josephus is knowledgeable concerning the βαπτ- word group, for he uses the verbs βαπτιζω 13 times and βαπτω three times.²⁰ He uses no other nouns for ‘baptism’ than those used here, which is quite strange if this text is a Christian interpolation. He never uses the noun βαπτισμα, which is the usual Christian noun for baptism (both John’s baptism and Christian baptism), and we would expect that term here if this text was a Christian interpolation.²¹ Therefore, the use of this vocabulary is hardly evidence for Christian interpolation.

20 βαπτιζω: War 1.437; 2.476; 2.556; 3.368; 3.423; 3.525; 3.527; 4.137; Ant. 4.81; 9.212; 10.169; 15.55; Life 15; βαπτω: War 1.490; 4.563; Ant 3.102

21 Furthermore, Josephus’ word βαπτισις is never used in the NT or early Christian literature. The other noun he uses, βαπτισμος, is only used for washing dishes (Mk 7.4), or ritual washings (Heb. 6.2; 9.10). The only place it is used for Christian baptism is Col. 2.12, where it is textually uncertain. BAGD, 132; Oepke, ‘βαπτω’, 1.545.

The sentence I have highlighted with bolded type can be misleading to lay readers. As written, it sounds like Josephus speaks of “baptism” with some frequency by using a term alien to Christian usage. But no, that’s not correct at all. Look at all the instances where Josephus uses βαπτιζω (13 times) and βαπτω (3 times). In no instance would I expect any translator to render the English word “baptism”. They are mostly about drowning or plunging deep….

βαπτιζω

War

1:437 …. [Herod] sent [Jonathan], by night, to Jericho and there, by his orders, he was plunged into the bathing-pool by the Gauls and drowned.

2.476 …. Then Simon, after slaying every member of his family, stood conspicuously over the bodies, and raising his right hand aloft for all to see, he plunged the sword up to the hilt into his own throat….

2.556 …. After the disastrous defeat of Cestius, many prominent Jews abandoned the City like swimmers, a sinking ship….

3.368 …. There is no greater coward than the captain who, fearing the stormy sea, deliberately sinks his ship before the tempest.

3.423 …. It dashed some of the ships to pieces against each other on the spot, others it drove onto the rocks. As the waves surged forward, many pushed their way out into deeper waters — so frightened were they of the rock-strewn coast, but even in the open sea the mountainous waves overwhelmed them.

3.525 …. when they ventured to approach, they had no time to do anything before disaster overtook them and they were sent to the bottom, boats and all.

3.537 …. If any of those who had been plunged into the water came to the surface, they were quickly dispatched with an arrow or a raft overtook them.

4.137 …. for supplies which might have been adequate for the combatants were squandered upon a useless and idle mob, who in addition to war brought upon themselves faction and starvation.

Ant

4.81 …. When therefore any persons were defiled by a dead body, they put a little of these ashes into spring water, with hyssop, and, dipping part of these ashes in it, they sprinkled them with it, both on the third day, and on the seventh, and after that they were clean.

9.212 …. and the ship was just going to be drowned, and when they were animated to do it by the prophet himself, and by the fear concerning their own safety, they cast him into the sea; upon which the sea became calm. It is also reported that Jonah was swallowed down by a whale, and that when he had been there three days, and as many nights, he was vomited out upon the Euxine Sea . . . .

10.169 …. and when Ishmael saw him in that case, and that he was drowned in his cups to the degree of insensibility, and fallen asleep, he rose up on a sudden, with his ten friends, and slew Gedaliah, and those that were with him at the feast . . . .

15.55 …. Now the nature of that place was hotter than ordinary; so they went out in a body, and of a sudden, and in a vein of madness; and as they stood by the fish-ponds, of which there were large ones about the house, they went to cool themselves [by bathing], because it was in the midst of a hot day. At first they were only spectators of Herod’s servants and acquaintance as they were swimming; but after a while, the young man, at the instigation of Herod, went into the water among them, while such of Herod’s acquaintance, as he had appointed to do it, dipped him as he was swimming, and plunged him under water, in the dark of the evening, as if it had been done in sport only; nor did they desist till he was entirely suffocated. And thus was Aristobulus murdered . . .

Life

15 …. Accordingly I came to Rome, though it were through a great number of hazards by sea; for as our ship was drowned in the Adriatic Sea, we that were in it, being about six hundred in number, ² swam for our lives all the night; when, upon the first appearance of the day, and upon our sight of a ship of Cyrene, I and some others, eighty in all, by God’s providence, prevented the rest, and were taken up into the other ship.

βαπτω

War

1.490 …. Now that the war had engulfed the whole region . . .

4.563 …. Yet though they wore women’s faces, their hands were murderous. They would approach with mincing steps, then suddenly became fighting men, and, whipping out their swords from under their dyed cloaks, they would run through every passer-by.

I am unable to find his “βαπτω” reference in Book 3.

One rarely encounters such a lopsided argument in scholarship, (I hope).

Josephus doesn’t use any βαπτ- words for “baptism” at all. Rather, for that ritual he uses words more usually translated as washing or bathing: λούεσθαι, ἀπολούεσθαι. I quote Rivka Nir again (note that Nir explicitly addresses Webb — another detail Kirby overlooked):

Yet, as of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a number of scholars raised the possibility that this passage is a Christian interpolation, notably Heinrich Graetz, who called it ‘a brazen forgery’ (unverschämte Interpolation).⁵ Arguing against its authenticity, scholars questioned its integration into the text: it interrupts the sequence of events and flow of syntax, and could therefore be easily removed.⁶ They puzzled over its positive and supportive tone towards John which is inconsistent with Josephus, the fierce opponent of anyone seeking to challenge the legitimate government or promote change or rebellion of any sort.⁷ They were equally puzzled by the presence of βαπτιστής, which became the distinctive epithet for John the Baptist in Christian sources.⁸ That Josephus would use this most explicitly Christian term and leave it unexplained, especially in a work addressed to Greek and Roman readers, they found hard to believe.⁹ On this point, further incredulity is raised by the presence of βαπτισμός and βάπτισις, the two terms used in the passage for the immersion associated with John. Being quintessentially Christian terms that Christian tradition applied to Christian baptism,¹⁰ they occur in Josephus only within this passage, marking divergence from his usual usage of terms associated with the Jewish ritual of immersion—λούεσθαι, ἀπολούεσθαι, meaning to purify a person from external physical defilement.¹¹

5 ) H. Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, III (Leipzig: O. Leiner, 1893), p. 276 n. 3. See further S. Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen (Berlin: S. Calvary & Co, 1902), p. 257; E. Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1964; 4th edn 1886), I, p. 438, n. 24; G. Dalman, Sacred Sites and Ways: Studies in the Topography of the Gospels (London: SPCK, 1935; first published 1919), p. 98. See also J. Efron, Studies on the Hasmonean Period (Leiden: Brill, 1987), p. 334 n. 218, who claims the paragraph on James, the brother of Jesus, is likewise a Christian interpolation, pp. 334-36.

6 ) L. Herrmann, Chrestos. Témoignages paients et juifs sur le christianisme du premier siècle (Brussels: Latomus, Revue d’Etudes Latines, 1970), p. 99; idem, ‘Herodiade’, REJ 132 (1973), pp. 49-63 (51).

7 ) Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes, I, p. 438 n. 24; E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (175 bc–ad 135), New English Version, revised and edited by G. Vermes and F. Millar (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973), I, p. 346; M. Goguel, Au seuil l’évangile Jean Baptiste (Paris: Payot, 1928), p. 19; Meier, A Marginal Jew, II, p. 99.

8 ) This name appears in first-century ce Greek only in the synoptic Gospels: Mk 1.4 ὁ βαπτίζων; Mt. 3.1; 11.11-12; 14.2-8; 16.14; 17.13; Lk. 7.20-33; 9.19—ὁ βαπτιστὴς. F. W. Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 165. See also Just. Dial. 50.2; G.W.H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 288; A. Oepke, s.v. βάπτω, βαπτισμός, βαπτιστής, TDNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), I, pp. 545-46. The common reply to this argument is that use of the same name in the Gospels and Josephus is evidence that this was his known and unique nickname: e.g. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet, pp. 34, 168. But, neither in Acts of the Apostles nor in the fourth Gospel is this nickname attached to John.

9 ) Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, p. 276, n. 3; Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, p. 33.

10) It is true that the passage does not use βάπτισμα, the most common term for Christian baptism. But the two terms— βάπτισις and βαπτισμός —likewise denote Christian baptism. On βάπτισις see Athanasius Alexandrinus, Quaestiones in Scripturas 41 (PG 28, col. 725); Sozomenus Salaminus, Historia ecclesiastica 2.34, I (PG 67, col. 1029); Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, p. 284; on βαπτισμός see Heb. 6.2; Chrys. Hom. Ad Heraeos 9.2 (PG 63, col. 78). And especially important for my thesis is its use of heretical ablutions. On frequent ritual washing of Ebionites: Epiph. Haer. 30.2 (PG 41, col. 408); on Marcionite repetition of baptism for remission of post-baptismal sins, see Epiph. Haer. 42.3 (PG 41, col. 700); on Sampsean baptism, see Epiph. Haer. 53.1 (PG 41, col. 960). See Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, p. 288.

11) See K.H. Rengstorf, A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus (Leiden: Brill, 2002), I, p. 290. Typically, this verb is used in reference to Bannus and to the Essenes, as I will show below.

So the words for “baptism” in the Josephan passage are indeed found in Christian usage, in particular in relation to “non-orthodox” Christian baptisms. They may appear late but they do refer to early “heretics” like the Marcionites and Ebionites. Moreover, the same words are never found in Josephus to mean the ritual “baptism” in any other place except in the suspect John the Baptist passage.

A good rule of thumb in academia when trying to overturn an argument is first to set out the targeted argument as strongly as you possibly can — so strongly that its exponents will wish they had put it like that. THEN proceed to dismantle it. That is not what Peter Kirby’s article has done. Rather, Kirby appears not to have even read the entirety of the Rivka Nir article of which he selects decontextualized paragraphs to criticize.

Note: None of the above proves that the John the Baptist passage in Antiquities by Josephus is an interpolation. I hope I have made it clear in this series of posts that I cannot prove that the passage is either inauthentic or even authentic. My sole interest is in trying to raise some awareness among anyone interested that the status of the passage is questionable. It may be authentic. At the same time, however, it is not unreasonable, certainly not “hyper-sceptical”, to entertain serious doubts about its authenticity. Does not the above at least open the door to a reasonable suspicion that the passage is of Christian origin?

Therefore, I suggest that attempts to settle the question by weighing pros and cons miss the point. If one wishes to argue that an argument either way (pro or against authenticity) is unreasonable, is illogical, is invalid for some other reason, then fine — make the case. But trying to win a debate by arguing that one person is more persuaded by one set of arguments than another seems to me to be a waste of time as far as making any relevant contribution to source criticism is concerned. But I will be addressing more generally the potential evidence of Josephus for the historian in the final post of this series.

Kirby, Peter. “The Authenticity of John the Baptist in Josephus.” Peter Kirby: Just Another WordPress Site (blog), May 21, 2015. https://peterkirby.com/john-the-baptist-authentic.html.

Nir, Rivka. “Josephus’ Account of John the Baptist: A Christian.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 10, no. 1 (2012): 32–62.

Webb, Robert L. John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Sociohistorical Study. Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock Pub, 2006.

2024-01-21

Where does John the Baptist fit in History? — The Evidence of Josephus, Pt 4

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Continuing….

(3) The Passage’s Reference to God’s Punishment of Herod

Peter Kirby asserts that contradictory viewpoints in Josephus are no reason to suspect the involvement of an alien hand somewhere in the transmission of our manuscripts. He quotes my (somewhat facile) paraphrase of Zindler’s point:

Neil Godfrey notes another one of the reasons that Zindler gives for suspecting an interpolation here:

In the John the Baptist paragraph the author writes that the reason Herod’s army was
defeated by Aretas was because God was punishing him for his unjust treatment of John.

But nope, that’s not the view of Josephus elsewhere. A few paragraphs later (18.7.2) Josephus writes:

And thus did God punish Herodias for her envy at her brother, and Herod also for giving ear to the vain discourses of a woman.

Kirby’s response is to suggest that Josephus could have thought both things at different times:

These are entirely different episodes, at different times, with different putative causes, and with different results. It is no difficulty to suppose that Josephus could have said both things. It is not as though Herod Antipas could be visited with God’s punishment only one time and for only one reason in the mind of Josephus. That is, the argument has no value even if we do conflate the opinion of “the Jews” with the personal opinion of Josephus in the Baptist passage. This argument might have some force, if the other passage were speaking of the cause being found for the destruction of Herod Antipas’ army as a punishment from God (instead of the cause being found for the banishment of Herod Antipas and his wife as a punishment from God).

That’s all very reasonable but it is also entirely ad hoc rationalisation. It may even be that Josephus, like most of us at some times, did hold contradictory or somewhat inconsistent views. Two things are worth keeping in mind, though.

The first one I should address is my “somewhat facile paraphrase” of Zindler’s argument. Kirby is not tackling Zindler but my summary as if it is the full account of Zindler’s view. Here is what Zindler wrote (and I hope I would today be more careful in how I express the ideas of others than I did in this instance in 2011):

A second … reason for concluding paragraph 2 is an interpolation is that in it Josephus cites – without indicating he believes otherwise – the supposed Jewish view that Herod came to a bad end because of his execution of the Baptist. Elsewhere [18:7:1; 18:255], however, Josephus gives his own – differing – view of why his god punished Herodias and Herod: “And so God visited this punishment on Herodias for her envy of her brother and on Herod for listening to a woman’s frivolous chatter” [Feldman translation].

(Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, 98)

Making sense of the scenario as described

Scholarly views that the account of John the Baptist only makes sense if JtB were more than a preacher of ethics and was rather (or as a rationale for his ethics) preaching the coming of a messiah, a feature otherwise deplored by Josephus:

Meier, Marginal Jew Vol 2, p 61 “… in Josephus John is reduced to a popular moral philosopher in the Greco-Roman mode, with a slight hint of a neo-Pythagorean performing ritual lustrations. His message is summed up in those twin virtues seen in Philo and other Jewish Diaspora authors: justice toward one another and piety toward God. The whole point of a special, once-and-for-all baptism, to be administered to Jews only by John (hence his surname), becomes unintelligible. If the Synoptic portrait of the Baptist did not exist, something like it would have to be invented to supply the material that Josephus either suppresses or simply does not know. In a sense, Josephus’ portrait of the Baptist is self transcending; it points beyond itself to some further explanation Josephus does not offer.”

Thomas, Mouvement Baptiste, pp 78-83 “The call to the practice of virtue must be placed within the context of Jewish beliefs; it can only be understood in the line of the prophets: justice and piety must prepare for the coming kingdom. What the crowds must have sought and found in John’s speeches is above all the “good news” of the messianic times, what Saint Matthew calls the proximity of the kingdom of God. . . . However, John’s success, the enthusiasm of the crowd, and Herod’s fears speak volumes and prove that this messianic aspect was not absent from John’s speeches. Moreover, only messianic hope could enthuse the people at that time. . . . So, therefore, the preaching and baptism of John, even for Josephus, despite his denial, have a messianic significance; for him, as for the evangelists, John preaches and baptizes in view of repentance, which in turn is meant to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. This is what emerges from the text when properly understood; it also explains both the great success of John and Herod’s apprehensions, ultimately leading to the imprisonment and death of John. Only the announcement of the imminent messianic times could attract the masses and persuade them to embark on a widespread movement of “conversion” and repentance; only the fear of a messianic uprising could touch Herod and prompt him to take drastic measures against John.” (translation from the French)

Schürer, History of the Jewish People Vol 1, p. 346 “The powerful preacher undoubtedly caused a great stir which was indeed primarily religious but was certainly not without a political impact. For at that tune the mass of the people were unable to differentiate between their religious and political hopes.”

Whose opinion?

So what we read in Josephus is that “the Jews” or “some of the Jews” held a belief that God punished Herod because of his treatment of John the Baptist. It is later that Josephus writes point blank that God punished Herod listening to the bad advice of a woman.

The question then becomes a far more interesting one. Try to imagine how Josephus came to know that back around the time he (Josephus) was born, “the Jews” and/or “some of the Jews” were in some way declaring (speaking? writing? across generations?) that Herod had met his demise because of his treatment of John the Baptist. Surely the only Jews who would have held such a view were those who were followers of, or at least very sympathetic towards, John the Baptist. But have we not seen that Josephus has provided no credible reason that a large number of ordinary Jewish people would have gathered in large mobs that looked frightening enough to make Herod alarmed for his safety. The scenario we read lacks a plausible explanation.

No, all that we learn from Josephus is that John the Baptist gathered large crowds, so large that the king feared they might turn violently against him, because he was teaching high moral principles, righteousness.

I find that scenario difficult to imagine in reality. (For more background to the argument I am setting out here see below.) I find it far easier to side with those scholars [see side box for some examples] who suggest that the only plausible explanation for the popularity of John the Baptist is that he had been stirring up hopes for a soon-coming messiah. With all that we think we know about Josephus, how could he ever have brought himself to speak any praises at all about such a figure.

And what kind of tradition was supposedly being circulated in Judea a generation or two later so that Josephus learned about these Jews who had enough critical mass for their ideas — that a preacher who won mass followers for preaching ethics and baptizing followers Qumran-style — to be recorded? Recall what we read in Antiquities:

But to some of the Jews the destruction of Herod’s army seemed to be divine vengeance, and certainly a just vengeance, for his treatment of John, called the Baptist. For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews who lead righteous lives and practice justice towards their fellows and piety toward God to join in baptism. . . .

. . . . When others too joined the crowds about him, because they were aroused to the highest degree by his sermons. Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on mankind might lead to some form of sedition, for it looked as if they would be guided by John in everything that they did.

What sorts of things were they doing under the sway of John’s eloquent persuasion that so alarmed Herod of John’s power? This account is all very vague but what it lacks in realistic historical detail it makes up for with richness of ideological traits that match what we read in the New Testament.

Is it likely that Jews or “some Jews” in the time of Josephus were reminding everyone that God punished Herod because he killed a man who attracted a popular following for preaching righteousness. I find the scenario hard to grasp for two reasons: that preaching high ethics attracts such a large following from the hoi polloi so that a king feels threatened; that more than a generation later such an unrealistic episode was still being talked about, such was its impact, that the only record of such a “unrealistically(?)” remarkable person and event found went otherwise unrecorded – not even noticed in later rabbinic writings who loved to speak of notables from the Second Temple era.

Am I being unrealistic? Hyper-sceptical? Misreading Josephus? (Serious questions)

Cui Bono?

In my defence against anyone who thinks so, I would like to point to another discussion of different viewpoints found in an ancient historical source. In Herodotus’s Histories one finds two different reasons given to explain the escape of Croesus from a fiery death, although in this case the two different reasons are artfully combined in a single episode. One of the reasons is attributed to “the Lydians”, reminding us that one of the reasons in Josephus for Herod’s demise is attributed to “the Jews”. (The other reason, in both Herodotus and Josephus, is stated as if it were the author’s own opinion.) One scholar attempts to trace the origin of the Lydian view and does so through the following manner:

An important heuristic device seems to me to be a question that is often used fruitfully in criminology in the absence of clear evidence: Cui bono? Who benefited from using a specific source to support a specific statement in a specific context? (Heinz-Günther Nesselrath p. 87, translation)

Continue reading “Where does John the Baptist fit in History? — The Evidence of Josephus, Pt 4”

2024-01-18

Where does John the Baptist fit in History? — The Evidence of Josephus, Pt 3

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Continuing….

Above all else, it is the early Jewish-Christian volume of the Pseudo-Clementine writings that provides the most striking parallel to Johannine baptism [in Antiquities of the Jews]

In this post I begin by addressing Peter Kirby’s final argument against Rivka Nir’s case for the John the Baptist passage in Josephus’s Antiquities being an interpolation. (I will return to his intermediate arguments in the next instalment.)

Kirby zeroes in on the logical fallacy of Nir’s argument as he (Kirby) has read it. Unfortunately, Kirby’s rewriting of Nir’s case relies on an interpretation of Nir’s concluding paragraphs that overlooks her preparatory argument and introductory statements through which that conclusion should be read. As a result, he omits two core elements that Nir has stressed in her article. Kirby summarizes Nir’s case this way:

Rivka Nir’s argument, then, if it is boiled down to the basics, runs something like this:

(a) Groups at the margin of Second Temple Judaism, such as the Qumran sect, had beliefs regarding “inner purification,” a “prior commitment to a righteous way of life,” as a “prerequisite for the efficacy of bodily immersion.”

(b) Jewish-Christian sects had similar beliefs regarding “inner purification,” a “prior commitment to a righteous way of life,” as a “prerequisite for the efficacy of bodily immersion.” (The point is also made that it can be considered an alternative to the function of the Temple cult.)

(c) Other Christian sects held that “Christian baptism itself bring[s] about forgiveness of sins.”

(d) Accordingly, the “Josephus account of John the Baptist may reflect an intra-Christian dispute concurrent with the formation of the Christian rite of baptism during the first centuries CE.” (emphasis added)

(e) “Josephus, as is well known, remained a faithful Jew. He was neither initiated into one of the JewishChristian sects, nor did he convert to Christianity.”

(f) “Thus, the inevitable conclusion is that the description of John’s baptism, as provided in the passage under review, was not written by Josephus, but was rather interpolated or adapted by a Christian or Jewish-Christian hand.”

By presenting the above points as the essence of Nir’s argument Kirby is able to make the following “valid” logical criticism:

When we widen the lens just a little, to include a view of the actual audience of Josephus, which was Hellenistic, instead of keeping a strict focus on Judaism and Christianity, as Rivka Nir does, we can clearly see the fallacy of the idea: not Jewish, therefore Christian. Yes, it may be that the distinction Josephus was making was in opposition to an idea that was not Jewish. It is a fallacy of the excluded middle, however, to conclude on this basis that the distinction is being made in contrast to Christian ideas. There are many different beliefs that are not Jewish but also not Christian.

That Josephus had mystery religions and their beliefs regarding forgiveness of sins, just by being washed in certain rites, in view here, seems probable.

But if we go back and read Nir’s essay as it led to her conclusion, we see that Nir is not so logically naive after all and that Kirby’s “boiled down basics” have glossed over key points in her presentation.

. . . But, more than anything else, what clinches the Christian sectarian identity of Johannine baptism in this passage is its characterization as ‘a consecration of the body’ on condition that ‘the soul was already thoroughly cleansed by righteousness’.⁴⁴ It is an immersion combining external physical purification with inner, moral, spiritual purification, where the latter is a prerequisite for the former.⁴⁵ Baptism will bring about ritual purification of the body only if the soul has already been purified by righteousness; that is, only if baptism has been preceded by repentance on the part of the candidate. . .

44) Jewish Antiquities, XVIII, 117.
45) As noted, n. 17 above, the explanatory clause uses wording implying a condition. See Meier, ‘John the Baptist in Josephus’, p. 231; idem, A Marginal Jew, II, pp. 57-58.

(Nir, p. 45)

The debated point Kirby misses is the place of ritual purification of the body. Does baptism, in addition to cleansing one of moral sin, also cleanse the physical body of ritual impurity? (See the side box.) John’s baptism, as explained in the Josephus passage, answers that it does also make one’s body ritually pure IF one has previously turned from sin to righteous living.

That is the point under debate in Josephus’s description of John’s baptism — is the body also ritually pure and under what conditions?

Kirby has overlooked that central point and reduced Nir’s argument to one of merely asking if baptism itself has the power to forgive sin or does baptism “work” only if one repents before baptism. He has missed the importance of the question of bodily purification.

Nir’s argument holds up because the debate over the relation of baptism to ritual purification of the body is only evidenced (as far as I am aware) in sectarian Jewish and Jewish-Christian works. It is not part of mystery religion teachings – at least I know of no evidence that it is. Nor do I know if Josephus anywhere else indicated any interest in polemicizing against rituals of mystery religions.

So a correct boiling down of Nir’s argument to its basics should run something like this:

(a) Groups at the margin of Second Temple Judaism, such as the Qumran sect, had beliefs regarding “inner purification,” a “prior commitment to a righteous way of life,” as a “prerequisite for the efficacy of bodily immersion” — and that efficacy includes ritual bodily purification as well as inner righteousness.

(b) Jewish-Christian sects had similar beliefs regarding “inner purification,” a “prior commitment to a righteous way of life,” as a “prerequisite for the efficacy of bodily immersion.” (The point is also made that it can be considered an alternative to the function of the Temple cult by making the body ritually pure.)

(c) Other Christian sects held that “Christian baptism itself bring[s] about forgiveness of sins” — and disputed the value of baptism making the body ritually pure.

(d) Accordingly, the “Josephus account of John the Baptist may reflect an intra-Christian dispute concurrent with the formation of the Christian rite of baptism during the first centuries CE.” (emphasis added) — given that the question of baptism relating to both inner and physical purification was a uniquely Jewish sectarian and Jewish-Christian one, and one debated by other Christians who disputed baptism’s efficacy in purifying the body. It has no known counterpart in other baptisms such as those of the Mithraists or other mystery religions.

(e) “Josephus, as is well known, remained a faithful Jew. He was neither initiated into one of the Jewish-Christian sects, nor did he convert to Christianity.”

(f) “Thus, the inevitable conclusion is that the description of John’s baptism, as provided in the passage under review, was not written by Josephus, but was rather interpolated or adapted by a Christian or Jewish-Christian hand.” — QED.

I said that two core elements of Nir’s argument should not be overlooked. Here is the second one, coupled with the one above, in the introduction to her concluding paragraphs:

Shedding further light on the early Christian or Jewish-Christian aspects of John’s baptism is the peculiar wording of the Josephus passage. John’s call for baptism is remarkably odd in its formulation. Rather than issuing a straightforward call for a baptism acceptable to God, defined as ‘a consecration of the body’ and qualified by the precondition of a soul already cleansed by righteousness, John (or the author) opts to introduce his appeal by refuting baptism conceived in terms of obtaining pardon for sins. ‘…if baptism [βάπτισιν] was to be acceptable to God’, they must not employ it ‘to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed’.

Such phrasing suggests the possibility of an author engaged in polemic with a competing interpretation of baptism and raises the question: against whom was such polemic directed?⁹²

92) That the description of baptism is formulated in a polemical way has already been noted by Foakes and Lake, The Beginning of Christianity, I, p. 105. In their view, the distinction being drawn is between Johannine baptism and Jewish ritual immersion. A. von Schlatter (Johannes der Täufer [Basel: F. Reinhardt, 1956], pp. 62-63) raises the possibility that Josephus is here attacking the Christian understanding of Johannine baptism or baptism in general or that the passage echoes a preexisting dispute between Christians and Jews over immersion, a dispute that Josephus found in the source material for his information about John the Baptist. Flusser (‘Johannine baptism and the Qumran sect’) has raised the possibility that this is a polemic against Christianity. Likewise, Grant R. Shafer, ‘John the Baptist, Jesus, and Forgiveness of Sins’, Proceedings – Eastern Great Lakes and Midwest Biblical Societies, 26 (2006), pp. 51-67 (59), asks: ‘Does Josephus just refute a Christian tradition that John forgave sins?’

Compare 1 Peter 3:21 where we read what may be best understood as an “orthodox” Christian’s denial that baptism makes the body pure.

This is a symbol of baptism, which now saves you—not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ (World English Bible trans)

Now look at a Jewish-Christian’s opposing view and see how close it is to what we read in the Josephan passage:

I have linked to online sources the references in footnote 88 with one exception, the first Rehm reference, which is not available on archive.org. The first reference, not available online afaik, follows :

πλήν τούτοις συνεισφέρειν δεϊ τί ποτέ, δ κοινότητα προς ανθρώπους μεν ουκ έχει, ίδιον δέ θρησκείας θεόυ τυγχάνει. λέγω δη τό καθαρευειν, τό έν άφέδρω οϋση τη ἰδία γαμέτη μή κοινωνείν, δτι τοϋτο ό θεοϋ κελεύει νόμος. τί δέ; εΐ μή καί τή τον θεοϋ θρησκεία τό καθαρεύειν άνέκειτο, υμείς ώς οι κάνθαροι ήδέως άν έκυλίεσθε; διό ώς άνθρωποι έχοντές τι πλείον των άλόγων ζώων (τό λογικοί είναι) τήν μέν καρδίαν των κακών ούρανίω καθάρατε λογισμώ, λουτρω δέ πλύνατε τό σώμα. καλόν γάρ τά άληθή τό καθαρεύειν, ούχ ώς δτι προηγείται τής κατά τήν καρδίαν χαθάρσεως ή τοϋ σώματος αγνεία, άλλ’ ώς δτι ἔπεται τώ άγαθω τό καθάριον. καί γάρ ό διδάσκαλος ήμών ένίους τών έν ήμίν Φαρισαίων και γραμματέων, οι είσιν άφωρισμένοι και τά νόμιμα ώς γραμματείς τών άλλων πλείον είδότες, δμως διήλεγχεν αυτούς ώς ύποκριτάς, δτι μόνα τά άνθρώποις φαινόμενα άγνενοντες τά τής καρδίας καθαρά καί θεω μόνφ δρώμενα παρελίμπανον.

ChatGPT translation:

Nevertheless, one must contribute something at some point, even though he has no commonality with people. He worships his own god. I mean, the act of purification. I say, to purify, that which, being in the chamber of one’s own wife, one should not share, for this is the law of one’s god. But what if, even in the worship of one’s god, he had to purify? Would you, like beetles, be unwilling? Therefore, as humans, having something more than irrational animals (that is, reason), purify your heart from evil thoughts, and wash your body. For it is good for true things to be purified, not because the purity of the heart precedes the purity of the body, but because what is pure follows the good. For indeed, our teacher, one of the Pharisees among us, and scribes, who are separated and know the laws better than others, nevertheless, he rebuked them as hypocrites because they neglected the purity of the heart and only focused on the things that appear to people and the things they do before God.

[A]bove all else, it is the early Jewish-Christian volume of the Pseudo-Clementine writings that provides the most striking parallel to Johannine baptism and inspired my present research. Describing a form of immersion meant to purify the body, the work is most emphatic on its efficacy being conditioned on prior inner purification. The notion is formulated in a manner exactly reminiscent of John’s immersion: ‘…purify your hearts from evil by heavenly reasoning, and wash your bodies in the bath. For purification according to the truth, is not that the purity of the body precedes purification after the heart, but that purity [of the body] follows goodness [of the heart]’.⁸⁸

⁸⁸⁾ Clem. Hom. 11.28 (trans. ANF, vol. 8, p. 290) [= this archive.org edition] bracketed inserts by the present author. See also B. Rehm, Die Pseudoklementinen. I. Homilien, 11.28 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1969), p. 168; Rec. 6, 11, 12 (ANF, vol. 8, p. 155 [= this archive.org edition). Thomas (Le mouvement Baptiste en Palestine et Syrie, p. 178, n. 4) already commented on the resemblance between this passage and Johannine baptism as described in Josephus. An identical formulation of baptism also appears in Kerygmata Petrou, H 11.28.2-4 (E. Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha, ed. W. Schneemelcher; London: SCM Press, 1975), II, p. 125 [= this archive.org edition]. This work, dated to the first half of the second century ce, survives only in fragmentary form and is considered by some to be one of the sources for the Pseudo-Clementines; G. Strecker, ‘On the Problem of Jewish Christianity’, in W. Bauer and R.A. Kraft (eds.), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), pp. 241-85 (258); Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 431.

As I said, I jumped ahead to the concluding portion of Kirby’s article in this post. The reason is that I believe this particular argument to be one of the stronger ones for interpolation and was impatient to get it “out there” asap. I will return to some of his earlier points in the next post.

Kirby, Peter. “The Authenticity of John the Baptist in Josephus.” Peter Kirby: Just Another WordPress Site, 21 May 2015, https://peterkirby.com/john-the-baptist-authentic.html.

Nir, Rivka. “Josephus’ Account of John the Baptist: A Christian.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 10, no. 1 (2012): 32–62. https://www.academia.edu/9556504/Josephus_Account_of_John_the_Baptist_A_Christian

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Neil Godfrey on A Little Question of Past Tense Pillars in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: “Might not the argument in that article only further increase the problem Paul’s failure to reference Peter’s behaviour in Jerusalem…” Dec 26, 01:27
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Neil Godfrey on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “I re-read my earlier reply and can see how you took it as “emotional” — but I can assure you…” Dec 18, 02:43
Neil Godfrey on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “I simply asked you to tell me what it is that you think I misunderstand or what, specifically, I am…” Dec 17, 20:26
Petr Jancar on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “Neil, I have no interest to engage in an emotional discussion. I felt indebted to you, since I read many…” Dec 17, 19:21

Multiple sources and circularity

When hypotheses become facts

Independent evidence is critical

The meaning of “Hellenistic”

The fateful year of 1992

The basics of historical inquiry

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Inheriting the land through natural population growth

God will drive them out before/as the Israelites arrive

God commands the Israelites to slaughter them all

The Land itself will “vomit” them out

Conclusion

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So where does John the Baptist fit in history?

Detailed explanations of linked points above……

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Who is Rivka Nir?

Meeting Intellectual Bias with Honesty and Humility

Most scholars agree…

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(14) The Word for “Baptism” in the Passage Uncharacteristic of Christian Usage

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(3) The Passage’s Reference to God’s Punishment of Herod

Whose opinion?

Cui Bono?

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